AT BREAKFAST

The day was dawning by this time, and the conversation was broken up. Constant set to work to prepare breakfast while the others extinguished the lanterns, trimmed them, filled them with oil, and “cleaned up” generally.

When breakfast was served, the scarcity of supplies was apparent. There were some “cold-water hoecakes,”—that is to say, bread made of corn-meal mixed up with cold water and a little salt, and baked in cakes about half or three quarters of an inch thick upon a griddle. There was a dish of fried salt pork, and with it some fried potatoes. And there was nothing else, except a “private dish” consisting of two slices of toast made from the scrap of stale wheat bread left, with a poached egg on each of them. There was no coffee and no butter, the last remains of that having been used upon the toast.

The “private dish,” Constant explained, was for Ed. “You see, we’re out to get him well, and his digestive apparatus doesn’t take kindly to fried things. I’ve saved four more eggs for him—the last we’ve got,—and six more slices of stale wheat bread. The rest of you are barbarians, and you’ll wrestle with any sort of hash I can get up till we get to Memphis.”

Ed protested vigorously against the favoritism shown him, but the others supported Constant’s plan, and the older boy had to yield.

“Well, I am deeply grateful for your kindness, boys,” he said, “and I’m duly grateful also to the thousands of men in various parts of the country who have worked so hard to furnish me with these two slices of toast.”

The boys looked up from their plates.

“Here’s another revelation,” said Irv. “My ill-furnished intelligence is about to receive another supply of much-needed rudimentary information. Go on, Ed. Tell us about it. How in the world do you figure out your ‘thousands’ of men who have had anything to do with those two slices of toast?”

“Oh, that was a joke,” said Will.

“It was nothing of the kind,” answered Ed. “I can’t possibly count up all the people who have worked hard to give me this toast, but they certainly number greatly more than a thousand.”

“We’re only waiting for wisdom to drop from your lips—” began Irv, with his drawl.

“O, quit it, Irv!” said Phil; “you’ll learn more by listening than by talking.”

“That is probably so,” said the other, “though I remember that we heard something away up the river, about how much a person learns of a subject by talking about it.”

“Yes, but—”

“Listen,” said Ed, “and I’ll explain. The wheat out of which this toast was made was grown probably in Dakota or Minnesota. There was a farmer there, and perhaps there were some farm-hands also, who ploughed the ground, sowed the seed, reaped the wheat, threshed it, winnowed it, and all that. Then—”

“Yes, but all that wouldn’t include more than half a dozen,” said Phil.

“Yes, it would,” said Irv, “for there’s all the womenfolk who cooked the men’s meals and—”

“Never mind them,” said Ed, “though of course they helped to give me my toast. Let’s count only those that contributed directly to that kindly end. These farmer people used ploughs, harrows, drills, reapers, threshing-machines, wagons, and all that, and somebody must have made them. And back of those who made them were those who dug the iron for them out of the ground, and cut the wood in them out of the forest, and the men who made the tools with which they did all this, and—”

“I see,” said Irv. “It’s the biggest endless chain imaginable. Thousands? Why, thousands had a hand in it before you even get to the farmer—the men who made the tools, and the men who made the tools that made the tools, and so on back to the very beginnings of creation. And if we face about, there are the men that ran the railroads which hauled the wheat to mill, and the millers, and all that. Oh, the thousand are easy enough to make out.”

“Yes,” said Ed, “and then the railroads and the mills had to be built. The men that built them, the engineers, mechanics, and laborers, all helped to give me my two slices of toast. So did the men behind them, the men who made their tools and their materials, the woodsmen who chopped trees for ties, the miners who dug the iron, the smelters, the puddlers, the rolling-mill men, who wrought the crude ore into steel rails; then there are all the men who made the locomotives, and the cars, and the machinery of the mills, and—”

“Oh, stop for mercy’s sake,” said Will. “It’s no use to count. There aren’t thousands, but millions of them. And of course the same thing is true of our clothes, our shoes, and everything else.”

“But with so many people’s work represented in it,” asked Irv, reflectively, “why isn’t that piece of toast an enormously costly affair?”

“Simply because so many people’s work is represented in it,” answered Ed. “If one man had to do it all for himself, it would never be done at all. Just imagine a man set down on the earth with no tools and nobody to help him. How much buttered toast do you suppose he would be able to turn out in a year? Why, before he could get so much as a hoe he would have to travel hundreds of miles, dig some iron and coal, cut wood with which to convert the coal into coke, melt the iron out of its ore, change it into steel, and shape it into a hoe. Why, even a hoe would cost him a year’s hard work or more, while a wagon he could hardly make without tools in a lifetime. Now he can earn the price of a hoe in a few hours, and the cost of a wagon in a few days or weeks, simply because everybody works for everybody else, each man doing only the thing that he can do best.”

“Then we all work for each other without knowing it,” said Will.

“Of course we do. When we fellows were diving for that pig-iron, we were working for the thousands of people who will use or profit by the things that somebody else will make out of that pig-iron and—”

“And for the somebody else,” said Irv, “that will make those things out of the pig-iron, and for all the ‘somebody elses’ that work for them, and so on in every direction! Whew! it makes my head swim to think of it. But what a nabob you are, Ed! Just think! Thousands and even millions of people are, at this moment, at work to make you comfortable!”

“Yes, and each one of the millions is at work for all the others while all the others are at work for him. Theorists sometimes dream out systems of ‘coÖperative industry,’ hoping in that way to better men’s condition. But their very wildest dreams do not even approach the complex and perfectly working coÖperation we already have in use.”

“Just think of it!” said Irv. “Suppose that every man in our little town of two or three thousand people had to do everything for himself! He would have to raise sheep for wool, card, spin, and weave it, and fashion it into clothes. He would have to raise cotton and linen in the same way, and cattle too, and keep a tannery and be a shoemaker and a farmer and a mason and a carpenter and all the rest of it. And then he would have to mine his own iron and coal, and make his own tools and—well, he wouldn’t do it, because he couldn’t. He’d just wander off into the woods hunting for something that he could kill and eat, and he’d try to kill anybody else that did the same thing, for fear that the somebody else would get some of the game that he wanted for himself. He’d be simply a savage!”

“Well, but even savages go in tribes and hunt together and live together,” said Will.

“Of course they do,” answered Ed, “and that’s their first step up toward civilization. When they do that they have learned in a small way the advantage of working together, each for all and all for each. The better they learn that lesson, the more civilized they become.”

“Then the theorists are right who want the state to own everything and everybody to work for the state and be supported by it?” asked Phil.

“Not a little bit of it,” said Ed. “That would be simply to go back to the tribal plan that savages adopt when they first realize the advantages of working together, and abandon when they grow civilized. We have worked out of that and into something better. With us, every man works for all the rest by working for himself in the way that best serves his own welfare. Under our system every man is urged and stimulated by self-interest to do the very best and most work that he can. Under a communistic or socialistic or tribal system, every man would be as lazy as the rest would let him be, because he would be sure of a share in all that the others might make by their labor. It is sharp competition that makes men do their best. It is in the ‘struggle for existence’ that men advance most rapidly.”

“Wonder if that wasn’t what Humboldt meant,” said Irv, “when he called the banana ‘the curse of the tropics,’ adding that when a man planted one banana tree he provided food enough for himself and his descendants to the tenth generation, in a climate where there is no real necessity for clothes.”

“Exactly,” said Ed. “Somebody once said that ‘every man is as lazy as he dares to be.’”

“Well, I am, anyhow,” yawned Irv, “and so I’m going up on deck under the awning to make up some of that sleep I lost last night.”