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Updated: May 5, 2025
"Good!" said I. "I never thought of that. What a novel thing it would be to witness the gradual growth of a hod-carrier! I'll make him a little hod, now, to begin with. He couldn't have a more suitable toy." "I was talking in earnest," she said. "Take your baby, and please carry him home as quick as you can, for I am certainly not going to take care of him."
In the United States the farther down we go in the grade of labor, the greater is the advantage which the laborer has over the higher classes. A hod-carrier or digger here can, by one day's labor, command many times more days' labor of a carpenter, surveyor, bookkeeper, or doctor than an unskilled laborer in Europe could command by one day's labor.
But nobody takes this view of them. The poorest and most ignorant hod-carrier would not hold, if asked, that because he cannot go to college there ought to be no colleges.
It is supposed that he spends a good deal of his time ranging the forest in search of "bee trees." Of course he is a tree-climber climbs by the "hug," not by means of his claws, as do animals of the cat kind; and in getting to the ground again descends the trunk, stern-foremost, as a hod-carrier would come down a ladder. In this he again differs from the felidae.
In this herd of swine to which you hope to reduce society an Edison or a Darwin is rewarded with the pay of a hod-carrier. The hod-carrier gets all he's worth now. This instinct for the herd, which you call Solidarity and Brotherhood, is not a prophecy of progress; it is a memory a memory of the dirt out of which humanity has slowly grown." Gordon grunted contemptuously.
I have considerable difficulty, indeed, in distinguishing him from his mates, though Josephine declares that she singled him out the moment he appeared on the scene. He suggests to me a compromise between a convict and a hod-carrier. Nevertheless, my eyes begin to water as I follow his every movement, and my pulses throb eagerly.
I saw the naked truth in hers the pitiful truth of the slim, poor, aristocratic little parish; the old church overtaken and surpassed by its more modern and middle-class rivals; and the minister's family struggling along on a salary that would have made a hod-carrier strike. She was neatly dressed; she looked like a gentle-woman, but one in straightened circumstances.
The certain point, and the only one for us to notice now, is that the universal conscience does not set the same price upon the labor of an overseer and the work of a hod-carrier.
The philosophers declared contentment to be happiness, arguing that the hod-carrier was likely to be happier in his hut than the millionaire in his palace; but was not that mere animal contentment, the happiness which knows no higher state, the ignorance of one whose eyes have never been raised to the heights? No, Jefferson was no fool.
It is true that such positions as street laborer, hod-carrier, cart driver, factory hand, railroad hand, were open to him; but such menial tasks were uncongenial to a man of his education and polish. And, again, society positively forbade him doing such labor. If a man of education among the colored people did such manual labor, he was looked upon as an eternal disgrace to the race.
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