Wager in Mid-air 181
other people walking about up there who’ve never been down a mine all their lives. And you get to asking yourself, ‘What the hell! I’m no different from them. What do I spend all day down in that damned hole for?’
“That’s the way lots of us began figuring. It wasn’t hard to get the other fellows to see our point of view. What the hell, we were risking our lives down there every day to make profits for the company. We all got together and were going to make a set of minimum demands for our safety—not wages, mind you, just for our safety. But we had an informer among us. Our plan leaked out and the company put a stop to it all.
“Later on, a couple of smooth, well-dressed men came along and told us how we ought to organize ourselves. They’d never been further down a mine than the pit-head but they pretended to know all about it. Well, we miners were a pretty uneducated bunch but we could tell fakes when we saw them. If these men really had our interests at heart, we’d have felt it and gone along with them all the way. But it didn’t take us long to see they were the type who make their living out of our troubles and a damned good living too. ‘Better honour than life, they used to teach us in the Army. Well, these men wanted honour and life—and plenty of both—all at our expense. The dirty rats—what could they teach us? It’s lucky for them they cleared out before I got my hands on them!
“No one who hasn’t really been a worker knows what it’s all about. You can’t learn it out of a book. You’ve got to be a worker, you’ve got to live like a worker, day after day, year after year. That’s the only way to get to understand the ‘labour problem’.
“We weren’t born to live like slaves or animals! We workers deserve the same share of the country’s wealth as everyone else. That’s what I’d like to tell society.”
‘A Socialist,’ I thought to myself and wondered whether all the others realized it. They used to sit listening to him in silence and occasionally I noticed Chō sighing as if moved by something the man had said.
