Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/466

450 permit no increase of wages at present. Next day the doors of the factories were closed, and each workman received his pay in full, and his discharge.

For a week the factories were empty and silent. The Confidence Society was not idle, however, for a trusty messenger had been sent at once to the village of Jonas. He offered four francs a day to the Jonas men if they would come over to work in Issoire. Now, Jonas is a queer little town, built all around the brow of an old volcano. I doubt if there is another like it on earth. The top of the hill is made of hard lava, below which is a belt of ashes, very old and packed solid, but as easy to cut as cheese. Long ago the ancient Gauls burrowed into this hill and filled it with their habitations. These appear like gigantic swallows' nests when you look at the hill from below. One of the largest of these houses is used as a church, and its lava walls are rudely frescoed over in imitation of the big church at Issoire. Only very poor people live in Jonas now, people who can not pay much rent, and who do not mind the absence of fire in the winter. And the Jonas men were glad to come over to Issoire for four francs a day, to take up the work which the pampered laborers of Issoire had refused.

The coming of the Jonas men was a great surprise in Issoire, and gave rise to much hard feeling. The workmen who were idle met them with eggs and cabbages, and some of them even carried bricks. But the gendarmes were on the side of the Confidence Society, and they protected the new men from any serious harm. So the mob followed sulkily in the rear, shouting "Rats! rats!" It sounded like "Rah, rah!" for this is the French way of saying "rats."

Winter was now approaching, and the discharged boot-makers of Issoire found their condition daily more and more unpleasant. They had an association among themselves called the "Chevaliers of Industry." The big Jacques was master-workman, and they met in the café of the Lion d'Or to discuss matters of common interest. They had a good deal to say of the power of organized labor, the encroachments of capital, and maintained that the value of all things is due solely to the labor which is put upon it. The so-called raw material, land, air, water, grass, cowhide, shoe-pegs, all these are God's bounty to men. No one should arrogate these to himself, and all should be as free as air. All else in value labor has given. Capital, the interloper, has unjustly taken the lion's share, and left a pittance to labor. What capital has thus taken is ours, for we have made it. Then the speaker referred to the snug little capital which the President of the Confidence Society had laid away in his strong-box, and which shone out through his plate-glass windows and made itself felt in every smirk of his self-satisfied face. Another speaker said that the thief of labor was