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Updated: June 11, 2025
In Berlin, you may see women staggering along with huge loads on their backs; in Munich, women are street-cleaners and hod-carriers; on the island of Capri, the trunk of the tourist is lifted by two men onto the shoulder of a woman, who carries it up the steep road to the village. In this country many women are forced to do hard bodily labour ten hours a day in sweat-shops.
Fort-making was the rage; the men worked with a will the women acting as hod-carriers to make the graves in which they hoped to live as deep as possible. All over the city the navvies amateur and professional sweated and panted, so successfully that unless the shells were to levy direct taxation on the people in the forts, well, the pieces might skim their heads but they could not cut them off.
Perhaps you gave her too much supper. Your mother doesn't really take it seriously, does she?" "I think she does," answered Terence. "One would think every brick in the hod had dropped on her. It's a good mammy, and I don't like to see her worried. It's to be hoped that the ghost belongs to the hod-carriers' union, and will go out on a strike. If he doesn't, there will be no peace in this family."
We must demonstrate our civilization to be complete at all points, and not simply a coddled exotic under glass. What if our Viennese guests, physically a stouter race than we, should pronounce our women too obviously not hod-carriers, and painfully unaccustomed to wheeling anything heavier than an arm-chair or a piano-stool? In that land of music concerts could not fail to be a leading feature.
It does even worse than that: it fosters the popular idea that all there is to do to make soldiers is to take so many laborers, clerks, hod-carriers, or farmers, and put on them uniforms, arm them with rifles, and call them "gallant Volunteers"! Out upon such an insane delusion! Fighting is a scientific trade.
And yet this man-born structure of theology, with aisles and pillars fretting and crumbling under the hand of reason, needs such eternal propping, restoring and repairing, that priestly tinkers, masons, hod-carriers are solely occupied with it. They grapple and fight for the poor shadows of dogma by which they live, and, so engaged, the spirit and substance of religion is by them altogether lost.
This entry offers a little encouragement: "There is no such thing as physical exhaustion.... Hunger and thirst may weight us down, but with the right kind of inspiration a man can do miraculous things.... I began rolling up balls of mud from the tunnel and carrying them into the cistern until my tongue hung out of my mouth.... With those balls I started making a winding stairway around the wall of this cistern until I had a dozen steps completed ... then the girls began making the balls and bringing them in to me like muddy little hod-carriers.... My masonry took on proportions as the minutes dragged by.... Finally we have a stairway four feet wide and extending from the bottom to within four feet of the top as I write these lines with the girls sitting a few steps below me in the slowly hardening clay.... We can all hear plainly the tramping of feet on the planking overhead.... It is a kind of shuffling one hears when seated somewhere beneath the dancers in a ballroom, and it may mean that we are headed directly toward the LION'S DEN."...
Brokers, poets, millionaires, bootblacks, beauties, hod-carriers and politicians become little black specks dodging bigger black specks in streets no wider than your thumb. From this high view the city itself becomes degraded to an unintelligible mass of distorted buildings and impossible perspectives; the revered ocean is a duck pond; the earth itself a lost golf ball.
White men are becoming house-servants, cooks and stewards on vessels at hotels. They are becoming porters, stevedores, wood-sawers, hod-carriers, brick-makers, white-washers and barbers, so that the blacks can scarcely find the means of subsistence a few years ago, a white barber would have been a curiosity now their poles stand on every street.
It was curious to see, amid this holiday turmoil men pursuing the ordinary business of their lives, and one was strangely rescued and consoled by the spectacle of the Irish hod-carriers, and the bricklayers at work on a first-class swell-front residence in the very heart of the city of tents and booths.
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