However, we plunged
into the wood, they skurrying in the lead, and the trouble was
quickly revealed: they had hanged a little fellow with a bark rope,
and he was kicking and struggling, in the process of choking to
death. We rescued him, and fetched him around. It was some more
human nature; the admiring little folk imitating their elders;
they were playing mob, and had achieved a success which promised
to be a good deal more serious than they had bargained for.
It was not a dull excursion for me. I managed to put in the time
very well. I made various acquaintanceships, and in my quality
of stranger was able to ask as many questions as I wanted to.
A thing which naturally interested me, as a statesman, was the
matter of wages. I picked up what I could under that head during
the afternoon. A man who hasn't had much experience, and doesn't
think, is apt to measure a nation's prosperity or lack of prosperity
by the mere size of the prevailing wages; if the wages be high, the
nation is prosperous; if low, it isn't. Which is an error. It
isn't what sum you get, it's how much you can buy with it, that's
the important thing; and it's that that tells whether your wages
are high in fact or only high in name. I could remember how it
was in the time of our great civil war in the nineteenth century.
In the North a carpenter got three dollars a day, gold valuation;
in the South he got fifty--payable in Confederate shinplasters
worth a dollar a bushel.
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