Читать книгу The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West онлайн

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Standing at the curb along an open space in front of a public building are a few “night hawks.” The horses are heavily blanketed and their noses buried in eating-bags. The cabmen have drawn together in social community on the pavement, where, as they gossip in the cold, they alternately stamp the flagging with their feet and clasp themselves in hard, sweeping embraces of the arms to stir the sluggish blood to swifter movement. An empty cable-car goes tearing round a “loop” with noise to awake the dead, and sets off again to some outermost portion of the town with a sleepy policeman on board and a newsboy, his bundle, damp from the press, upon his lap, who is bent on being first with news to that suburban region. The cars fill first with workingmen who are bound for distant factories and workshops and their posts along the lines of railways.

The streets are echoing now to the sounds of increasing traffic and to the steps of the vanguard of workers. These are the wage-earners, men for the most part, but there are women, too, and children. Here is humanity in the raw, hard-handed and roughly wrought for the Atlasian task of sustaining, by sheer physical strength and manual skill, the towering, delicate, intricate structure of progressive civilization.