"_
Something too much of this! Let me not yield to the spell of the
picturesque. To recur to matters of fact and get down to prose and the
times we live in let us halt a moment on this southerly journey and have a
look in upon Lyons, the industrial capital of France, which is directly on
the way.
The idiosyncrasy of Lyons is silk. There are two schools of introduction in
the art of silk weaving, one of them free to any lad in the city, the other
requiring a trifle of matriculation. The first of these witnesses the whole
process of fabrication from the reeling of threads to the finishing of
dress goods, and the loom painting of pictures. It is most interesting of
course, the painstaking its most obvious feature, the individual weaver
living with his family upon a wage representing the cost of the barest
necessities of life. Again, and ever and ever again, the inequalities of
fortune! Where will it end?
The world has tried revolution and it has tried anarchy. Always the
survival of the strong, nicknamed by Spencer and his ilk the "fittest." Ten
thousand heads were chopped off during the Terror in France to make room
for whom? Not for the many, but the few; though it must be allowed that in
some ways the conditions were improved.
Yet here after a hundred years, here in Lyons, faithful, intelligent men
struggle for sixty, for forty cents a day, with never a hope beyond! What
is to be done about it? Suppose the wealth of the universe were divided per
capita, how long would it remain out of the clutches of the Napoleons of
finance, only a percentage of whom find ultimately their Waterloo, little
to the profit of the poor who spin and delve, who fight and die, in the
Grand Army of the Wretched!
III
We read a deal that is amusing about the southerly Frenchman.
Pages:
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34