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$Unique_ID{bob01299}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{(A) Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court
Chapter 33}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{wages
pay
day
hundred
now
dowley
cent
get
little
work}
$Date{1889}
$Log{}
Title:       (A) Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1889

Chapter 33

Sixth-Century Political Economy

     However, I made a dead set at him, and before the first third of the
dinner was reached, I had him happy again.  It was easy to do - in a country
of ranks and castes.  You see, in a country where they have ranks and castes,
a man isn't ever a man, he is only part of a man, he can't ever get his full
growth.  You prove your superiority over him in station, or rank, or fortune
and that's the end of it - he knuckles down.  You can't insult him after that.
No, I don't mean quite that; of course you can insult him, I only mean it's
difficult; and so, unless you've got a lot of useless time on your hands it
doesn't pay to try.  I had the smith's reverence, now, because I was
apparently immensely prosperous and rich; I could have had his adoration if I
had had some little gimcrack title of nobility.  And not only his, but any
commoner's in the land, though he were the mightiest production of all the
ages, in intellect, worth, and character, and I bankrupt in all three.  This
was to remain so, as long as England should exist in the earth.  With the
spirit of prophecy upon me, I could look into the future and see her erect
statues and monuments to her unspeakable Georges and other royal and noble
clotheshorses, and leave unhonored the creators of this world - after God -
Gutenberg, Watt, Arkwright, Whitney, Morse, Stephenson, Bell.

     The king got his cargo aboard, and then, the talk not turning upon
battle, conquest, or ironclad duel, he dulled down to drowsiness and went off
to take a nap.  Mrs. Marco cleared the table, placed the beer keg handy, and
went away to eat her dinner of leavings in humble privacy, and the rest of us
soon drifted into matters near and dear to the hearts of our sort - business
and wages, of course.  At a first glance, things appeared to be exceeding
prosperous in this little tributary kingdom - whose lord was King Bagdemagus
- as compared with the state of things in my own region.  They had the
"protection" system in full force here, whereas we were working along down
towards free trade, by easy stages, and were now about half way.  Before
long, Dowley and I were doing all the talking, the others hungrily listening.
Dowley warmed to his work, snuffed an advantage in the air, and began to put
questions which he considered pretty awkward ones for me, and they did have
something of that look"

     "In your country, brother, what is the wage of a master bailiff, master
hind, carter, shepherd, swineherd?"

     "Twenty-five milrays a day; that is to say, a quarter of a cent."

     The smith's face beamed with joy.  He said:

     "With us they are allowed the double of it!  And what may a mechanic get
- carpenter, dauber, mason, painter, blacksmith, wheelwright, and the like?"

     "On the average, fifty milrays; half a cent a day."

     "Ho-ho!  With us they are allowed a hundred!  With us any good mechanic
is allowed a cent a day!  I count out the tailor, but not the others - they
are all allowed a cent a day, and in driving times they get more - yes, up to
a hundred and ten and even fifteen milrays a day.  I've paid a hundred and
fifteen myself, within the week.  'Rah for protection - to Sheol with free
trade!"

     And his face shone upon the company like a sunburst.  But I didn't scare
at all.  I rigged up my pile driver, and allowed myself fifteen minutes to
drive him into the earth - drive him all in - drive him in till not even the
curve of his skull should show above ground.  Here is the way I started in on
him.  I asked:

     "What do you pay a pound for salt?"

     "A hundred milrays."

     "We pay forty.  What do you pay for beef and mutton - when you buy it?"
That was a neat hit; it made the color come.

     "It varieth somewhat, but not much; one may say seventy-five milrays the
pound."

     "We pay thirty-three.  What do you pay for eggs?"

     "Fifty milrays the dozen."

     "We pay twenty.  What do you pay for beer?"

     "It costeth us eight and one half milrays the pint."

     "We get it for four; twenty-five bottles for a cent.  What do you pay
for wheat?"

     "At the rate of nine hundred milrays the bushel."

     "We pay four hundred.  What do you pay for a man's tow-linen suit?"

     "Thirteen cents."

     "We pay six.  What do you pay for a stuff gown for the wife of the
laborer or the mechanic?"

     "We pay eight cents and four mills."

     "Well, observe the difference: you pay eight cents and four mills, we
pay only four cents.  "I prepared, now, to sock it to him.  I said: "Look
here, dear friend, what's become of your high wages you were bragging so
about, a few minutes ago?"  And I looked around on the company with placid
satisfaction, for I had slipped up on him gradually and tied him hand and
foot, you see, without his ever noticing that he was being tied at all.
"What's become of those noble high wages of yours?  I seem to have knocked
the stuffing all out of them, it appears to me."

     But if you will believe me, he merely looked surprised, that is all!  He
didn't  grasp the situation at all, didn't know he had walked into a trap,
didn't discover that he was in a trap.  I could have shot him, from sheer
vexation.  With cloudy eye and a struggling intellect, he fetched this out:

     "Marry, I seem not to understand.  It is proved that our wages be double
thine; how then may it be that thou'st knocked therefrom the stuffing - an I
miscall not the wonderly word, this being the first time under grace and
providence of God is hath been granted me to hear it."

     Well, I was stunned; partly with this unlooked-for stupidity on his
part, and partly because his fellows so manifestly sided with him and were of
his mind - if you might call it mind.  My position was simple enough, plain
enough; how could it ever be simplified more?  However, I must try:

     "Why, look here, brother Dowley, don't you see?  Your wages are merely
higher than ours in name, not in fact."

     "Hear him!  They are the double - ye have confessed it yourself."

     "Yes-yes, I don't deny that at all.  But that's got nothing to do with
it; the amount of the wages in mere coins, with meaningless names attached to
them to know them by, has got nothing to do with it.  The thing is, how much
can you buy with your wages?  That's the idea.  While it is true that with
you a good mechanic is allowed about three dollars and a half a year, and
with us only about a dollar and seventy-five - "

     "There - ye're confessing it again, ye're confessing it again!"

     "Confound it, I've never denied it I tell you!  What I say is this.
With us half a dollar buys more than a dollar buys with you - and therefore
it stands to reason and the commonest kind of common sense, that our wages
are higher than yours."

     He looked dazed, and said, despairingly:

     "Verily, I cannot make it out.  Ye've just said ours are the higher, and
with the same breath ye take it back."

     "Oh, great Scott, isn't it possible to get such a simple thing through
your head?  Now look here - let me illustrate.  We pay four cents for a
woman's stuff gown, you pay eight cents and four mills which is four mills
more than double.  What do you allow a laboring woman who works on a farm?"

     "Two mills a day."

     "Very good; we allow but half as much; we pay her only a tenth of a cent
a day; and - "

     "Again ye're conf -"

     "Wait!  Now, you see, the thing is very simple; this time you'll
understand it.  For instance, it takes your woman forty-two days to earn her
gown, at two mills a day - seven weeks' work; but ours earns hers in forty
days - two days short of seven weeks' wages are gone; ours has a gown, and
two days' wages left, to buy something else with.  There - now you understand
it!"

     He looked - well, he merely looked dubious, it's the most I can say; so
did the others.  I waited - to let the thing work.  Dowley spoke at last -
and betrayed the fact that he actually hadn't gotten away from his rooted and
grounded superstitions yet.  He said, with a trifle of hesitancy:

     "But - but - ye cannot fail to grant that two mills a day is better than
one."

     Shucks!  Well, of course I hated to give it up.  So I chanced another
flyer:

     "Let us suppose a case.  Suppose one of your journeymen goes out and
buys the following articles:

     "1 pound of salt;
     1 dozen eggs;
     1 dozen pints of beer;
     1 bushel of wheat;
     1 tow-linen suit;
     5 pounds of beef;
     5 pounds of mutton.

     "The lot will cost him thirty-two cents.  It takes him thirty-two
working days to earn the money - five weeks and two days.  Let him come to us
and work thirty-two days at half the wages; he can buy all those things for a
shade under fourteen and one half cents; they will cost him a shade under
twenty-nine days' work, and he will have about half a week's wages over.
Carry it through the year; he would save nearly a week's wages every two
months, your man nothing; thus saving five or six weeks' wages in a year,
your man not a cent.  Now I reckon you understand that 'high wages' and 'low
wages' are phrases that don't mean anything in the world until you find out
which of them will buy the most!"

     It was a crusher.

     But alas, it didn't crush.  No, I had to give it up.  What those people
valued was high wages; it didn't seem to be a matter of any consequence to
them whether the high wages would buy anything or not.  They stood for
"protection," and swore by it, which was reasonable enough, because
interested parties had gulled them into the notion that it was protection
which had created their high wages.  I proved to them that in a quarter of a
century their wages had advanced but thirty per cent, while the cost of
living had gone up one hundred; and that with us, in a shorter time, wages
had advanced forty per cent, while the cost of living had gone steadily down.
But it didn't do any good.  Nothing could unseat their strange beliefs.

     Well, I was smarting under a sense of defeat.  Undeserved defeat, but
what of that?  That didn't soften the smart any.  And to think of
circumstances!  The first statesman of the age, the capablest man, the
best-informed man in the entire world, the loftiest uncrowned head that had
moved through the clouds of any political firmament for centuries, sitting
here apparently defeated in argument by an ignorant country blacksmith!  And
I could see that those others were sorry for me - which made me blush till I
could smell my whiskers scorching.  Put yourself in my place; feel as mean as
I did, as ashamed as I felt - wouldn't you have struck below the belt to get
even?  Yes, you would; it is simply human nature.  Well, that is what I did.
I am not trying to justify it; I'm only saying that I was mad, and anybody
would have done it.

     Well, when I make up my mind to hit a man, I don't plan out a love tap;
no, that isn't my way; as long as I'm going to hit him at all, I'm going to
hit him a lifter.  And I don't jump at him all of a sudden, and risk making a
blundering halfway business of it; no, I get away off yonder to one side, and
work up on him gradually, so that he never suspects that I'm going to hit him
at all; and by and by, all in a flash, he's flat of his back, and he can't
tell for the life of him how it all happened.  That is the way I went for
brother Dowley.  I started to talking lazy and comfortable, as if I was just
talking to pass the time; and the oldest man in the world couldn't have taken
the bearings of my starting place and guessed where I was going to fetch up:

     "Boys, there's a good many curious things about law, and custom, and
usage, and all that sort of thing, when you come to look at it; yes, and
about the drift and progress of human opinion and movement, too.  There are
written laws - they perish; but there are also unwritten laws - they are
eternal.  Take the unwritten law of wages: it says they've got to advance,
little by little, straight through the centuries.  And notice how it works.
We know what wages are now, here and there and yonder; we strike an average,
and say that's the wages of today.  We know what the wages were a hundred
years ago, and what they were two hundred years ago; that's as far back as we
can get, but it suffices to give us the law of progress, the measure and rate
of the periodical augmentation; and so,  without a document to help us, we
can come pretty close to determining what the wages were three and four and
five hundred years ago.  Good, so far.  Do we stop there?  No.  We stop
looking backward; we face around and apply the law to the future.  My
friends, I can tell you what people's wages are going to be at any date in
the future you want to know, for hundreds and hundreds of years."

     "What, goodman, what!"

     "Yes.  In seven hundred years wages will have risen to six times what
they are now, here in your region, and farm hands will be allowed three cents
a day, and mechanics six."

     "I would I might die now and live then!" interrupted Smug the mason,
with a fine avaricious glow in his eyes.

     "And that isn't all; they'll get their board besides - such as it is: it
won't bloat them.  Two hundred and fifty years later - pay attention, now - a
mechanic's wages will be - mind you, this is law, not guess-work; a
mechanic's wages will then be twenty cents a day!"

     There was a general gasp of awed astonishment.  Dickon the wheelwright
murmured, with raised eyes and hands:

     "More than three weeks' pay for one day's work!"

     "Riches - of a truth, yes, riches!" muttered Marco, his breath coming
quick and short, with excitement.

     "Wages will keep on rising, little by little, little by little, as
steadily as a tree grows, and at the end of three hundred and forty years
more there'll be at least one country where the mechanic's average wage will
be two hundred cents a day!"

     It knocked them absolutely dumb!  Not a man of them could get his breath
for upwards of two minutes.  Then the coal burner said prayerfully:

     "Might I but live to see it!"

     "It is the income of an earl!" said Smug.

     "An earl, say ye?" said Dowley; "ye could say more than that and speak
no lie; there's no earl in the realm of Bagdemagus that hath an income like
to that.  Income of an earl - mf!  It's the income of an angel!"

     "Now then, that is what is going to happen as regards wages.  In that
remote day, that man will earn, with one week's work, that bill of goods
which it takes you upwards of five weeks to earn now.  Some other pretty
surprising things are going to happen, too.  Brother Dowley, who is it that
determines, every spring, what the particular wage of each kind of mechanic,
laborer, and servant shall be for that year?"

     "Sometimes the courts, sometimes the town council; but most of all, the
magistrate.  Ye may say, in general terms, it is the magistrate that fixes
the wages."

     "Doesn't ask any of those poor devils to help him fix their wages for
them, does he?"

     "Hm!  That were an idea!  The master that's to pay him the money is the
one that's rightly concerned in that matter, ye will notice."

     "Yes - but I thought the other man might have some little trifle at
stake in it, too; and even his wife and children, poor creatures.  The
masters are these: nobles, rich men, the prosperous generally.  These few,
who do no work, determine what pay the vast hive shall have who do work.  You
see?  They're a 'combine' - a trade union, to coin a new phrase - who band
themselves together to force their lowly brother to take what they choose to
give.  Thirteen hundred years hence - so says the unwritten law - the
'combine' will be the other way, and then how these fine people's posterity
will fume and fret and grit their teeth over the insolent tyranny of trade
unions!  Yes indeed! the magistrate will tranquilly arrange the wages from
now clear away down into the nineteenth century; and then all of a sudden the
wage earner will consider that a couple of thousand years or so is enough of
this one-sided sort of thing; and he will rise up and take a hand in fixing
his wages  himself.  Ah, he will have a long and bitter account of wrong and
humiliation to settle."

     "Do ye believe -"

     "That he actually will help to fix his own wages?  Yes, indeed.  And he
will be strong and able, then."

     "Brave times, brave times, of a truth!" sneered the prosperous smith.

     "Oh - and there's another detail.  In that day, a master may hire a man
for only just one day, or one week, or one month at a time, if he wants to."

     "What?"

     "It's true.  Moreover, a magistrate won't be able to force a man to work
for a master a whole year on a stretch whether the man wants to or not."

     "Will there be no law or sense in that day?"

     "Both of them, Dowley.  In that day a man will be his own property, not
the property of magistrate and master.  And he can leave town whenever he
wants to, if the wages don't suit him - and they can't put him in the pillory
for it!"

     "Perdition catch such an age!" shouted Dowley, in strong indignation.
"An age of dogs, an age barren of reverence for superiors and respect for
authority!  The pillory -"

     "Oh, wait, brother; say no good word for that institution.  I think the
pillory ought to be abolished."

     "A most strange idea.  Why?"

     "Well, I'll tell you why.  Is a man ever put in the pillory for a
capital crime?"     "No."

     "Is it right to condemn a man to a slight punishment for a small offense
and then kill him?"

     There was no answer.  I had scored my first point!  For the first time,
the smith wasn't up and ready.  The company noticed it.  Good effect.

     "You don't answer, brother.  You were about to glorify the pillory a
while ago, and shed some pity on a future age that isn't going to use it.  I
think the pillory ought to be abolished.  What usually happens when a poor
fellow is put in the pillory for some little offense that didn't amount to
anything in the world?  The mob try to have some fun with him, don't they.?"

     "Yes."

     "They begin by clodding him; and they laugh themselves to pieces to see
him try to dodge one clod and get hit with another?"

     "Yes."

     "Then they throw dead cats at him, don't they?"

     "Yes."

     "Well, then, suppose he has a few personal enemies in that mob - and
here and there a man or a woman with a secret grudge against him - and
suppose especially, that he is unpopular in the community, for his pride, or
his prosperity, or one thing or another - stones and bricks take the place of
clods and cats presently, don't they?"

     "There is no doubt of it."

     "As a rule he is crippled for life, isn't he - jaws broken, teeth
smashed out - or legs mutilated, gangrened, presently cut off - or an eye
knocked out, maybe both eyes?"

     "It is true, God knoweth it."

     "And if he is unpopular he can depend on dying, right there in the
stocks, can't he?"

     "He surely can!  One may not deny it."

     "I take it none of you are unpopular - by reason of pride or insolence,
or conspicuous prosperity, or any of those things that excite envy and malice
among the base scum of a village?  You wouldn't think it much of a risk to
take a chance in the stocks?"

     Dowley winced, visibly.  I judged he was hit.  But he didn't betray it
by any spoken word.  As for the others, they spoke out plainly, and with
strong feeling.  They said they had seen enough of the stocks to know what a
man's chance in them was, and they would never consent to enter them if they
could compromise on a quick death by hanging.

     "Well, to change the subject - for I think I've established my point
that the stocks ought to be abolished.  I think some of our laws are pretty
unfair.  For instance, if I do a thing which ought to deliver me to the
stocks, and you know I did it and yet keep still and don't report me, you
will get the stocks if anybody informs on you."

     "Ah, but that would serve you but right," said Dowley, "for you must
inform.  So saith the law."

     The others coincided.

     "Well, all right, let it go, since you vote me down.  But there's one
thing which certainly isn't fair.  The magistrate fixes a mechanic's wage at
one cent a day, for instance.  The law says that if any master shall venture
even under utmost press of business, to pay anything over that cent a day,
even for a single day, he shall be both fined and pilloried for it; and
whoever knows he did it and doesn't inform, they also shall be fined and
pilloried.  Now it seems to me unfair, Dowley, and a deadly peril to all of
us, that because you thoughtlessly confessed, a while ago, that within a week
you have paid a cent and fifteen mil -"

     Oh, I tell you it was a smasher!  You ought to have seen them go to
pieces, the whole gang.  I had just slipped up on poor smiling and complacent
Dowley so nice and easy and softly, that he never suspected anything was
going to happen till the blow came crashing down and knocked him all to rags.

     A fine effect.  In fact as fine as any I ever produced, with so little
time to work it up in.

     But I saw in a moment that I had overdone the thing a little.  I was
expecting to scare them, but I wasn't expecting to scare them to death.  They
were mighty near it, though.  You see they had been a whole lifetime learning
to appreciate the pillory; and to have that thing staring them in the face,
and every one of them distinctly at the mercy of me, a stranger, if I chose
to go and report - well, it was awful, and they couldn't seem to recover from
the shock, they couldn't seem to pull themselves together.  Pale, shaky,
dumb, pitiful?  Why, they weren't any better than so many dead men.  It was
very uncomfortable.  Of course I thought they would appeal to me to keep mum,
and then we would shake hands, and take a drink all round, and laugh it off,
and there an end.  But no; you see I was an unknown person, among a cruelly
oppressed and suspicious people, a people always accustomed to having
advantage taken of their helplessness, and never expecting just or kind
treatment from any but their own families and very closest intimates.  Appeal
to me to be gentle, to be fair, to be generous?  Of course they wanted to,
but they couldn't dare.