f. Neither man nor boss took any
special interest in the work itself. The men were allowed to waste
just so much time in getting water, in filling their pipes, in
spitting on their hands, in resting on their shovels, in lazy chatter,
and so long as they did not exceed this nothing was said.

The trouble was that the standard was low and this was because the men
had nothing to gain by steady conscientious work and also because the
boss did not understand them nor distinguish between them. For
instance the foreman ought to have got the work of two men out of me
but he wouldn't have, if I hadn't chosen to give it. That held true
also of Rafferty and one or two others.

Now my idea was this: that if a man made a study of these men who, in
this city at any rate, were the key to the contractor's problem, and
learned their little peculiarities, their standards of justice, their
ambitions, their weakness and their strength, he ought to be able to
increase their working capacity. Certainly an intelligent teamster
does this with horses and it seemed as though it ought to be possible
to accomplish still finer results with men. To go a little farther in
my ambition, it also seemed possible to pick and select the best of
these men instead of taking them at random. For instance in the
present gang there were at least a half dozen who stood out as more
intelligent and stronger physically than all the others. Why couldn't
a man in time gather about him say a hundred such men and by better
treatment, possibly better pay, possibly a guarantee of continuous
work, make of them a loyal, hard working machine with a capacity for
double the work of the ordinary gang? Such organization as this was
going on in other lines of business, why not in this? With such a
machine at his command, a man ought to make himself a formidable
competitor with even the long established firms.

At any rate this was my theory and it gave a fresh inspiration to my
work. Whether anything came of it or not it was something to hope for,
something to toil for, something which raised this digging to the
plane of the pioneer who joyfully clears his field of stumps and
rocks. It swung me from the present into the future. It was a
different future from that which had weighed me down when with the
United Woollen. This was no waiting game. Neither your pioneer nor
your true emigrant sits down and waits. Here was something which
depended solely upon my own efforts for its s