Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/157

 Rh and it would be so easy to take out the panes without breaking them. In the barracks transparent paper takes the place of window glass, letting in no light and keeping in no heat, therefore more furniture is burnt to warm the barracks.

Metal roofing is allowed to lie for months in the midst of the wreckage of destroyed houses. It rusts and becomes absolutely useless. The roofs of the inhabited houses are also rusted and the rain comes through, but nothing is done to mend them. Walls and ceilings fall in and well built houses rapidly become uninhabitable.

And this is how by sheer stupidity, by lack of regard for their own labor, our people destroy the valuable assets of the nation and ruin the patrimony of the public.

Our streets are littered with pieces of iron and the moujik (peasant) in his village has nothing wherewith to repair his wheels and axles, and cannot even forge shoes or nails for his horses or teeth for his rakes. That is why he goes out to the railway bridges and tries to saw off a piece of iron, or to loosen the rivets of the sleepers, or attempts to steal from the station the piece of metal that he needs. For a carload of iron the moujik would gladly barter a carload of wheat. Yet the hundreds of thousands of old saucepans that are scattered among the ruins of the houses would suit him very well and he could put to good use the window sashes and doors that are burned in the cities for heating purposes.

Doubtless these are all very minor matters, and particularly unimportant to us whose object is to teach the whole world a new order of things and a new manner of life. But can one learn conscientiously from masters who themselves either do not know how to work or will not work, and who will soon have no clothes to put on their backs? I do not think the European workman can have any great respect for comrades who do not know how to organize their own labor. The politics of social revolution doubtless is very fine, but work comes first.