Copper--a Study in Ingots and Men

SOMETIMES I walked past the refinery door, after dark, and if the night was warm found it open. Furnaces despite their heat and drudgery fascinate, and I would gaze through the refinery door in odd half-hours whenever I could snatch them.

It was hard to see much: the furnaces were squatty, and dark, about twentyfive feet wide, with a bulky, winding pipe or stack that carried away smoke from the top. Coal heated them, and behind — you could see through the dirty windows of the mill — a fireman or two, beneath the level of the floor, heaved coal or cleared away ashes.

At night the furnace outlines were printed upon the dark by the flame of the copper showing through crannies. Especially round the doors, on the side of the furnace, where the scrap metal was fed into her for melting, there were sharp lines of light, making you guess at interior fires. Now and then a big door on the front of the furnace gaped, and I was reminded of open-hearth days. The load was an inch or two below the lip of the door, and seemed to threaten it continually with overflow. Streams of bright metal light lit a broad segment of the floor, and I saw objects clearly for a second. A free space in front of the furnace; then scores of moulds for copper ingots bunched close; two hand-trucks, a ladle half in the dark, barrels in rows, an auto-truck. When the door shut, the objects went back again into shadows, doubtful or unguessed.

One day, a transfer finished its course through official channels, and came into my hands, with orders to begin work next morning in the refinery. I had asked for a transfer to a job at labor, some status where I could learn the making of metal with the work of my two hands. But I had n’t anticipated refining. A ’job on the rolls’ was my ambition — that seemed the key process in all these mills. But since I was sent to the refinery, I would take what the metal gods gave. Besides, a few curiosities would get satisfied, I meditated — fed up, perhaps. I had some technical curiosities, for example, about the machinery of refining, the chemistry of it, its contrasts with furnace-work in steel, and more. Into the midst of this thinking came current ‘dope’ on the refinery: ‘Hell of a hole, I hear, — the worst place in the mill.’

I reported to the foreman at 6.48 the next morning and was turned over at once to a clerk who found his way past many barrels of copper scale, to a row of lockers. He assigned me an end one and left. A few feet from my side was the ‘cupola furnace,’ used for remelting slag, and twenty or thirty feet to the rear lay the boiler-room of the mill. But whatever heat assaulted me was welcome; it was November and the outdoor air very bitter indeed. I put a board on the floor to stand on and got into my blast-furnace clothes, which I had brought with me wrapped in newspaper. There was the kersey cap, khaki shirt, and lough cloth pants — no overalls — army field-shoes. With the active bend and swing of furnace work, I knew overalls were not the fashion.

Seven o’clock — I could tell by the rumbling of rolls and the boom of the engine in the other part of the mill. I stepped across the refinery floor. The most intense activity absorbed every corner of it; appearing to a new man, standing on its edge, as huge violence and mess. Everything was done by hand and in haste. There seemed to be no cranes, no engines, no assisting machinery. More like a queer sort of battle, I thought, than a process of manufacture.

The foreman had said I would work on the ‘ floor gang’ which I tried to pick out of the battle. I guessed at the ten or fifteen Hunkies with hand-trucks who moved empty moulds close to the furnace, and then by a lot of admirable dodging bore full ones away. The pouring of the metal caught my eye. I noticed a ladle with a scoop, say a foot and a half through, and a handle twenty feet long, suspended in the centre by a chain. A husky chap on the handle guided it into the furnace door, scooped up gingerly molten copper—a ladleful — and started to swing it toward an empty mould. But I had no further view of him; the foreman saw me and motioned toward a tall Irishman, who was, I gathered, the labor boss. He transferred to my hands a truck which he had been pushing, and pointed toward empty moulds. My career on the furnace began.

We were a kind of endless chain of labor for the moving of moulds within range of the ladle-pourer, and the moving of moulds away when a two hundred pound ingot of copper had been poured inside. Certain Hunky workmen stood at either end of the chain, to load your truck with an empty mould, or to reload it with a full one. The molten copper in the ladle demanded quick pouring before it cooled, and the chain must move fast enough to keep the space by the furnace filled with empties, and cleared of full moulds. For the gang it was a kind of race.

Two or three hundred pounds on a hand-truck has a will of its own. It is obstinate about starting, very, and much more so about stopping. When you navigate one across a refinery floor, you have reckonings to make on four or five points. There is the floor itself which has ridges and holes to avoid; two or three trucks press you from behind, and as many before. You have fear of an ingot assaulting your back if you don’t step lively, and of depositing your own on the heels of the man in front if you do. There are the refiners and the furnace gang proper who consider that they have free passage before any mere truckers of moulds; and there is the ladle itself with its load of hot metal which has its right of way without anybody’s question.

Some of the ‘empties’ were found twenty feet from the furnace; others we trucked from a remote corner sixty feet off. It was a circuitous route, with many broken plates, and floor ridges, known only to old mariners, so that a spill happened to someone every few minutes. I had, by the grace of God, so far kept my moulds on an even keel. But here there were six iron plates gone from the floor, letting you down on rough dirt for a whole inch — which is a mountain to copper-laden trucks. I took all the run I could, but had to swerve right for a Wop with an empty. My wheels stopped at the mountain, and the mould with ingot inside tumbled into the highway. Three trucks stopped behind me. I tried jarring the mould out of the runway by bunting against it with my truck. That was n’t the way. The faces of the three truckers blackened; I felt as if I had stalled a Ford in the thick of Broadway — till the labor boss advanced with tongs, remounted the mould on my truck very easily, and motioned me off like a cop. Clearly it was a recognized form of misfortune. By drawing back for a rush start I mounted the ridge.

A rest-spell turned up a little later. In approaching the hot region I found that the endless chain had gained a little on the ladle-pouring, and there were empties enough. I leaned on my truck, and watched the fluid copper drip into moulds. These were placed in rough half-circle before the furnace, while the ladle made a slow swing around to fill them. The chain, being attached near the centre of the handle, almost balanced a full ladle and went aloft to a small wheel which followed a circular track above the moulds. When ladleman had coaxed his swinging vessel of metal into position over a mould, he dripped the first spatterings with utmost care. Here were six hundred pounds of curdling copper hung on a chain, and a mere twitch of a wrong muscle would turn it out upon the floor, or on to men’s feet.

There were two kinds of moulds, long and rectangular, and short and round. The latter were the lightest, and it was easy to see that the truckers competed for them. But they had their disadvantages. If you went over a hunk of slag or an uneven floor-plate on your way to the furnace, your little mould slipped between the rungs of your truck to the floor. If you returned with a hot ingot inside your round mould, your disaster was more extended. Both mould and ingot slipped through the rungs, when the road was rough, and sought opposite directions. You left your truck, and searched for tongs, with the halted traffic watching you blackly.

The labor boss helped me with one sprawling ingot, and afterward added a few genial words of comfort and sympathy: ‘Goddam truck’s no good, slip right through, wa’n’t meant for them moulds.’ And on another occasion: ‘Truck you’ve got’s no good. One or two good ones. Get here early and get one.’

When every mould had been poured and trucked away, I looked at my watch, wondering if it were near noon. It was 8.30. Scattered over the wide area of the refinery were moulds pointing in every direction, filled with ingots still hot. Three of the gang had taken tongs and were pulling them out. They lay on the iron floor like red logs, square and round, and gave you slaps of fierce heat as you walked among them. What now? The crew of trucks began to move toward the men with tongs; they took on a bar or two each — feather light without the mould.

‘One pile here,’ said the labor boss. We collected the bars and piled them for an hour. Was the refining of copper performed solely with a truck? Calculations were going on in my head of the quantity of cheap manpower applied in this mill to the lifting, moving, piling, pushing of copper — raw transfer of mass weight which men for a generation or so had constructed machines to perform. Two hands lifted a bar on my truck. I pushed it forty-five feet to another point on the refinery floor. Two more hands lifted it from my truck to a rising tower of copper, built like a wood pile. Ten other men like myself moved bars to other piles in other places. Memories came of winding gangs of Negroes I had seen in foreign ports, carrying bags of coal to pour into the hold of a ship.

With some eagerness I wondered as I trucked the last bar, whether the jobs of the rest of the day would be of the same genre, and cheat the engineer and inventor of his due. One overhead crane! It would almost make the floor gang obsolete.

The job we turned to was cleaning moulds. ‘Get a stick with a brush on the end, you’ll find one by the slag house. Set the mould on end with the stick; brush off that white dust you see inside; knock it down, set it up t’other end; brush that.’

Then trucking reappears for a vast stretch. Moulds have to be reassembled in neat rows before the furnace. I resolved that in future, at this phase, I would withdraw from the competition for trucks, and appoint myself one of the two who loaded, but did not truck. Loading, it seemed to me held a touch of distinction. There were only two of you; you stood quietly in one place, loading at your own time the trucks of half your comrades; teetering the moulds into a secure position on the truck’s heel, by a skillful movement of your stick.

I began to notice Brennan about this time. Reaching for a scrap box on a pile he straightened himself for an instant, and I had a glimpse of his true proportions. He was six feet three, or so. Then he lifted a scale barrel out of the way of a truck, and demonstrated the strength of his height. But I watched him for other things, and especially, his consummate disdain. His movements eloquently cried: ‘Why, in heaven’s name do I bother with these things?’ He was seventy-odd years old, and claimed a service record with the company of fifty years. Most of the things we did for him we did wrong, and he poured upon us the experience and the scorn of his fifty years of dexterity.

A scramble of round ingots, weighing only eighty-four each and easy to handle, lay near the scales. We rolled them on with tongs and our feet. The scales were similar to the type you drive a load of hay on, and the platform, when we had covered it with short round copper ingots, looked like a strip of red corduroy road with copper logs.

Mosher, the refinery clerk, was visible through the windows of the little office marking up the poundage on his book. After weighing, we made the ingots into two pyramids beside the scales by slow piling with tongs. Brennan appeared to watch and grunt. When we had finished, I noticed that the control-ropes of the little hand-crane had been assumed by one of the gang. A vacantfaced laborer slipped the chains under the edges of one pyramid, and shouted guttural Spanish to the man at the ropes. Slowly, and rather unsteadily, the copper logs rose — 6000 pounds of them — and swayed doubtingly toward a motor truck. Two of us pushed them gently truekward, and breathlessly watched one of the chains creep near the centre of the load. Brennan was saying, ‘Oop, oop,’ very sharply, when the chain slipped another quarter inch, and the 6000-pound mass flew into bars and hit with a rumble the iron floor of the refinery, scattering toward everyone’s feet.

Brennan’s emotions were too much for him. He had no words into which to pour them; he gave us his back.

Later I had a glimpse of ‘charging the furnace.’ Ten men were at it, — four with forks, and shovels, two with rods, the rest with their hands. The door of the furnace was open and the furnace fires a few feet from our faces. The small scrap, the shavings of copper, the ‘ends’ and small shapes, they shoveled in like coal. I had a vivid remembering of furnace-shoveling in Pennsylvania. As for the matted bales and tangles of wire, and tied-up bunches of strips, they threw these on rods resting on the open doorsill, which two men held. Several with long poles pushed the strips into the swimming hearth of the furnace. I watched their haste, and recognized the familiar movements of men who work in heat. They were more exposed to the open flame, I figured, than any of us had been in steel. Inside you could see the wire coils blaze and fall away like twigs in a fire of brush.

The five-minute whistle blew. I washed up — with hot water and a new can of Skat, changed my coat, only, and punched the clock.

It was a fifteen minutes’ walk to Mrs. Ketcham’s boarding-house, and seemed very long indeed.

At one o’clock, we went out at once into a scrap-filled yard, under a new boss. It seems that all day, from the time the hearth is emptied of molten copper in the morning, it is necessary to heap up a new mass of wire, chips, scale, scrap — for the next day’s charging. So we worked at that. A little hill grew beside each furnace. The refinery yard was irregular with a small machine shop on one frontage, the side and end of a stone house and shearing-room for copper sheets on another, the backs of some of Main Street’s wooden houses on the end. We worked at that end upon a hill of mixed scrap.

A big flat-truck was used, which we hauled across the yard — the floor ‘jitney’ was sick for the day. To begin with, the Spaniard with a bump on the back of his head, and I, assaulted the hill with hooks. We pulled down coils and masses of discolored copper wire. Some bunches were small and a single workman could throw them on the truck; others were heavy and required four men. It took us a half-hour to load.

‘That’ll do,’said the boss in an Irish voice, and put his hand on the load. ‘Let’s go!'

Three of us took the truck handle, and strained ahead; the rest threw their weight against the load, at half a dozen places.

‘Now,’ said the boss.

We drove forward after a great effort, and almost dropped the top of the load. The thing stopped, and we swayed and lurched till it creaked forward. I felt like a horse; was conscious of anger somehow, like a wave of heat. After swaying over the dirt part of the yard, the load went easy. We reached pavement and a little incline, so that the truck slid into the door of the refinery like a freight on a grade. Then a sharp turn to the right inside the door, and past the back of an annealing furnace, with the handle of the truck whipping a little, as the wheels went over a sunken floor-plate.

‘Scales,’said the boss.

Another turn to the right, grunts and noises modified by the breathing effort of push—necks, arms, the thews of legs in it. She mounts a little incline and makes the scale platform.

Mosher comes out of the room, looking like a sheet of white paper, and says, ‘Five thousand,’ to the boss. We start for the furnaces. The truck takes its own direction as we turn past the fixed moulds in front of the furnace. The end of a mould catches a wheel. A three-hundred-pound coil dribbles off the top; the rest is steadied; we disentangle and get off again. There is manœuvring in the area by the furnace doors near the scrap pile. The space is hardly twice the truck’s length. I figure our journey from yard to furnace ten minutes; scrap poundage, 5000; power, nine Spaniards, and one American; morale forty per cent.

Then the dumping. Twenty hands pushing against the wire coils, till she tips past dead centre, then a yell and quick retreat. The truck usually capsizes as the metal goes, and sprawls back toward us.

Nobody hurries, but someone in the end rights the truck, and starts back in low for another load. On this one, I did my piling with a thick-set, goodlooking Spaniard who knew no American. We worked steadily and together as the scrawny, unknown chap hooked the coils down. Here, I said to myself, is pure labor, unalloyed with any skill, any horizon, or mental flicker. It has n’t the strain or the heat of the open-hearth steel furnace I once worked on, but it’s nearer drudgery.

There are ten pairs of ‘hands’ on this job to one supervising brain. I looked over at the supervising brain. The boss rested a sharp chin easily upon a bony hand; he waited peaceably till we had finished the load.

‘We are poor crane service,’ I thought, reverting to an old idea.

There was time that afternoon to learn further and to get some practice with the topography of the floor. In the yard, close to the door of the refinery were barrels of ‘scale,’ an offscouring of the pickle tubs, very wet, greenish, and the heaviest, hand-truck load we were called upon to wrestle. I trucked three barrels of it, and I remember the course we all followed. There was an incline at the door that needed a rush start, twenty feet further, chunks of slag on the floor, then sunken plates near the scales, and,turning into Number 1, a series of plates gone, several feet of dirt-running, and an inch edge to surmount in getting on plates again. After those three barrels, I thought I was rid of the job when Mosher suddenly appeared from the office with a piece of paper and immense seriousness of purpose.

‘One more over there,’ he said, and after a pause, with a gray smile, ‘ Well, how do you like the job?’ He had noticed that I was an American. ‘Work on the floor awhile,’ he continued, ‘and some day, you’ll get a crack at the furnace.'

‘The job’s all right,’ I returned, ‘I can’t hand the floor much, though.’

‘No, it’s a bad floor,’ he agreed. ‘Now a few years ago we had a new floor put in, then it was easy to push a truck, easier for everybody. I ’ve been here twenty odd years.’

‘A long time,’ I answered, partly as admiration.

‘It is a long time,’ the clerk went on.

‘ Do you know what that stuff is you ’re putting into the furnace?’

‘No,’ said I.

‘It’s scale, and it gets on the bars you know, when they’re heated in the annealing furnace.’

‘I see,’ said I, pushing my truck under the new barrel, while he lifted an edge.

‘I’ll see you again,’ he concluded. ‘I’ll tell you little things, when I can.’

I pushed the barrel toward the furnace, Mosher helping me to get under way. I felt friendly, but at the same instant immensely superior in my furnace-labor job to his clerkship. I returned to the Spaniards.

They were dropping out of the undifferentiated gang mass, and falling into individual shapes for me. A handsome chap, a little shorter than I, wearing the high waisted velvet pants of the newly arrived Spaniard, gave me a smile of very white teeth, whenever he passed with his truck. In the afternoon at the scrap piling, I learned that his name was Carlos Rio. Then the man with the quarter-inch growth of beard — he proved a meddlesome worker — and the tall lummox with the vacant face — I was beginning to observe his occult capacity for gravitating toward the easier job, loading not trucking, pushing not pulling. The man with a bump on the back of his head was a hard worker.

At 4.10, I noticed the regular furnace gang washing their hands and putting on coats.

‘Furnace gang go home?' I asked Carlos.

‘Get all through, go home, three o’clock, mebbe — five o’clock, mebbe — mebbe six o’clock,’ he said in exposition.

‘We work till six o’clock,’ he commented grinning.

We spent the next hour and a half shoveling sand in barrels, trucking empties to the yard, putting long wedge-bars on the scales and off. At 5.30, it looked as if we had cleared up all the rough labor there was in sight. One of the night shift had arrived, a middle-aged, puffy-faced man with a pipe and a black coat. He went up and opened the furnace door. I looked in with some curiosity.

All the sticks and shapes and coils had melted into a thick bubbling red brew that surged to the very brim. When he had closed the door, I noticed how shadowy the refinery was, as dark as it had been at seven, when I got into my blast-furnace clothes and took a truck. We unloaded another auto, and put the scrap beside Number 1. Five minutes of six blew and, finding it very dark near my locker, I went into the slag house and brushed my hair by the light of a dull gas jet burning there.

At nine o’clock, I fell back in bed. ’The job has a little of the excitement of my old job in a steel mill,’ I thought; ‘the red bars rolling about your feet make it uncomfortable, and at the same time bearable. The anxious intensity of pouring-time gives it flavor. These things will fade, though; I know that. What will stand out and blacken days to come will be the tugging at scrap, the loadings and unloadings, the pushing of scrap — ten men pushing five thousand pounds on a flat truck — to dump and back again, piling up a new load: wire, shapes, and scale: keeping that pile high at the furnace door.’

I set my alarm a little earlier — 6 A.M. It was a longer walk to the refinery and I wanted to be on time to get a good truck, and not the one with the loose wheel.

As work days went by, I grew into the gang. They were almost as new at the job as I. And some even newer. As we learned the simple motions of the work, it was easier to signal or coöperate, and hence easier to advance in understanding. The way to talk opened up and men took a whack at it with two words of American or even with Spanish, greatly assisted by head and hands. I knew no Spanish, but the fellow with the bump on the back of his head and one other had a sprinkle of French which opened a partial channel for talk.

Carlos was the most ambitious of all to learn, and I early made a trade with him to teach me his language in return for mine — a trade I had made once before with a young Croatian in an open-hearth pit. We had our language battles in the lunch hour, sitting on a truck near the hot rolling-mill.

I had liked the looks of Carlos from the first. He was short and close-knit, but not heavy — a somewhat boyish build, black hair, an arresting profile with distinguished brow and nose. He stood about — when he could — in a Spanish slouch that was altogether graceful.

After three or four noons together he had told me the story of his life in thirty-four day English. His father, he said, had a little farm in Spain, with fruit trees — apple, orange, peach. He raised wheat ‘li’l bit.’ He said he had ‘plenty eat’ but no money for clothes, boots, or anything else. He therefore resolved to ‘ come America.’ (This was certainly orthodox immigrant psychology.) Wages, he said, were 90 cents a day in Spain and likely to become 25 or 20. Three months before he came over, he had married— at 22, I think. He anxiously awaited the first letter from his young wife. Again, plans for the future were orthodox. He intended to make ‘big money’ and at fortyfive or fifty go back to Spain.

‘But children — they go school America — become American.’

Here was considerable foresight for a husband of twenty-two.

I found the English language was infectious. The rest of the gang observed Carlos and me, who were teaching each other our respective tongues, and began to ask t he English names for parts of the mill and parts of the body. They made ever-increasing efforts to talk to me with their hands, making use of Carlos for interpreter. A strong, well-built chap in a black shirt, who did all parts of the job easily, showed great friendliness but was utterly longue-tied. He responded with great hilarity to my few words of Spanish, and having his locker next mine, I tried them out on him twice daily. Of course a complication was this: there are four dialects — so Carlos says — in Spain, besides Spanish, the literary language. Carlos knew Spanish and a couple of the dialects. Some of the others knew the dialects only. Still we managed.

The man we all hated was ‘CrazyMan.’ It may be a fact that he was a little jangled in his brain; surely there was a vacancy in his eye that made ugly rapport with a mouth that was angry, sullen, and weak all in one. Crazy-Man was tall with shed-the-rain shoulders, and ape arms. He combined versatility with a profound lack of manual dexterity. He sought out invariably what might be called the more distinguished angles of our job. He loved pulling the ropes that controlled the electric crane; he would mount bars on another man’s truck. He enjoyed arranging chains or bars, or ropes on the scrap box. But the misfortune was that he was supremely maladroit in all these things. I remember when he pushed in angrily to take the ropes from another man’s hands and fix them himself over a scrap box. The crane lifted and they pulled off. A triumphant jeer swept the observant gang. He very literally frothed at the mouth.

He was very apt to lift a coil or a bar hastily and get his fingers jammed. Or ostentatiously to grab the handle of the big truck and then run it aground on a bar or a barrel. He would get desperately angered with himself at that, while the gang grew delirious with appreciation. They would yell ‘CrazyMan ' at him and much more in Spanish. And they’d make the well-known circular motions beside the head with one hand, which is universal language among all Hunkies for ‘You’re a nut.’

I did several jobs with a chap I wondered about, a man with markedly Spanish features, who still wore his high-waisted foreign pants. His back was permanently bowed; his face livid, with a beaten look in it, as though you could kick him, and he would growl but had long ago made up his mind to attempt nothing more, under the circumstances. He did his work more slowly than the others, but with great method. He’d breathe hard at times, as when I worked with him moving slag cakes and he mounted them on my truck.

One day I was asking Carlos the ages of members of the gang. I pointed at bent-back; called him an old man.

‘Young man,’ Carlos said, ‘thirtylive; he work too much, in Spain — that’s all.’

Sometimes I felt that every day was like the last; sometimes I saw their differences. A meagre variety occurred through the slight changes in the amount of work that, fell to us, and somewhat in its distribution over the ten hours. Certain chunks of labor we had always. There was invariably pouring in the morning; but, as work grew slack, only one furnace kept on, and pouring-time was shorter though not cut in half. We always trucked up empty moulds at seven in the morning, and trucked back full ones, pulled bars from moulds, trucked and piled bars, brushed out moulds, assembled them, loaded trucks with copper bars, and spent the afternoon, keeping the scrap pile high beside the furnace doors. I began to look forward to variety in the everlasting scrap we hauled. There were always ‘scalpings,’ wire, strips, ends, and a number of copper shapes. There was ‘scale’ and ‘tin scrap’ — copper coated with tin — of which the furnace was allowed only a moderate admixture. And then I remember the day we trucked automobile gaskets. It was more fun unloading gaskets than plain bundles of rectangular strips.

I had seen ‘cabbages’ of brass made in the brass rolling-mill. A shapeless mass of scrap goes into the cabbager and comes out pressed slabs about the size of paving stones. It is easier to handle. When I think of cabbages, I think of David the Pole. He joined the gang a week or so later than I, and was the huskiest man among us. He weighed about two hundred and was n’t fleshy. With a heavy load on the flat truck, the handle whips a man back and forth on the rough spots. One afternoon we kept at cabbages for several hours and the loads ran heavy. Finally we piled cabbages on the truck till we could hardly reach the load.

David took the handle. The truck made the incline well enough near the door, but when the wheels struck bits of slag near the cupola, it whipped about like a tiller in a storm. I watched David. With all his two hundred pounds of Polish muscle, he fought a great fight for equilibrium from the door to the scales. The trucks are about like the four-wheeled ones used for trunks on a railway platform. The scales helped to explain. The load weighed seven thousand pounds.

Sometimes in the noon hour after I had eaten my meat sandwiches, and drunk the pint of milk bought from the tiny grocery by the gate, I would sit the hour out and think about the gang. Or in a lull of hauling in the afternoon, when the necessity for alertness or strength was taken away, I had thoughts about characteristics of the gang and the nature of gangship.

There is, I meditated, infinitely more variety in the gang-worker’s job than in the machine operator’s; he lives, besides, a more sociable life. I felt a sense of warm security in the confidence and friendliness of that mixed gang, that I had lacked on other jobs in the brass mill. There was uncertainty, of course, and a great ignorance of the trend of battle, but with it a sense of common gang-destiny. If there was doubt about the length of the job, at least there would be some flavor of adventure in breaking into the next.

But other thoughts pushed themselves into my mind, in these brief lulls of physical exertion. A common-labor floor gang is the lowest rung in the ladder, I suppose. Its security is at a minimum, and it will feel the unemployment hatchet first. (Five of us were dropped last pay-day.) And the job itself is crude and unalloyed labor. It is not true to say that no apprenticeship is needed. There is a knack in handling sledge, chain, shovel, bar, that is not learned in one shift. But of craftsmanship, of real skill, there is a hint and no more. The ‘dirty work’ of society falls to the labor gang. They are at the frontier — which machinery and intelligence has n’t reached: the inheritors of the work of the pyramid builders and of the men who lifted up the stones for the Chinese wall.