Excellent workmen, instead of making all the improvements in their power, follow with indifference the old jog-trot.What a pity! for an intelligent man, occupied all his life with some special employment, must discover, in the long run, a thousand ways of doing his work better and quicker.I will form, therefore, a sort of consulting committee; I will summon to it my foremen and my most skillful workmen.Our interest 1s now the same.Light will necessarily spring from this centre of practical intelligence.' Now, the speculator is not deceived in this, and soon struck with the incredible resources, the thousand new, ingenious, perfect inventions suddenly revealed by his workmen, `Why' he exclaims, `if you knew this, did you not tell it before? What for the last ten years has cost me a hundred francs to make, would have cost me only fifty, without reckoning an enormous saving of time.' 'Sir, answers the workman, who is not more stupid than others, "what interest had I, that you should effect a saving of fifty per cent? None.But now it is different.You give me, besides my wages, a share in your profits; you raise me in my own esteem, by consulting my experience and knowledge.
Instead of treating me as an inferior being, you enter into communion with me.It is my interest, it is my duty, to tell you all I know, and to try to acquire more.' And thus it is, Mdlle.Angela, that the speculator can organize his establishment, so as to shame his oppositionists, and provoke their envy.Now if, instead of a cold-
hearted calculator, we tape a man who unites with the knowledge of these facts the tender and generous sympathies of an evangelical heart, and the elevation of a superior mind, he will extend his ardent solicitude; not only to the material comfort, but to the moral emancipation, of his workmen.Seeking everywhere every possible means to develop their intelligence, to improve their hearts, and strong in the authority acquired by his beneficence, feeling that he on whom depends the happiness or the misery of three hundred human creatures has also the care of souls, he will be the guide of those whom he no longer calls his workmen, but his brothers, in a straightforward and noble path, and will try to create in them the taste for knowledge and art, which will render them happy and proud of a condition of life that is often accepted by others with tears and curses of despair.Well, Mdlle.Angela, such a man is--but, see! he could not arrive amongst us except in the middle of a blessing.There he is--there is M.Hardy!"
"Oh, M.Agricola!" said Angela, deeply moved, and drying her tears; "we should receive him with our hands clasped in gratitude."
"Look if that mild and noble countenance is not the image of his admirable soul!"
A carriage with post horses, in which was M.Hardy, with M.de Blessac, the unworthy friend who was betraying him in so infamous a manner, entered at this moment the courtyard of the factory.
A little while after, a humble hackney-coach was seen advancing also towards the factory, from the direction of Paris.In this coach was Rodin.
[30] The average price of a workman's lodging, composed of two small rooms and a closet at most, on the third or fourth story.
[31] This calculation is amply sufficient, if not excessive.A similar building, at one league from Paris, on the side of Montrouge, with all the necessary offices, kitchen, wash-houses, etc., with gas and water laid on, apparatus for warming, etc., and a garden of ten acres, cost, at the period of this narrative, hardly five hundred thousand francs.An experienced builder less obliged us with an estimate, which confirms what we advance.It is, therefore, evident, that, even at the same price which workmen are in the habit of paying, it would be possible to provide them with perfectly healthy lodgings, and yet invest one's money at ten per cent.
[32] The fact was proved in the works connected with the Rouen Railway.
Those French workmen who, having no families, were able to live like the English, did at least as much work as the latter, being strengthened by wholesome and sufficient nourishment.
[33] Buying penny-worths, like all other purchases at minute retail, are greatly to the poor man's disadvantage.
