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Updated: June 8, 2025
They are our gods: they round and ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living. Our proclivity to details cannot quite degrade our life and divest it of poetry. The day-laborer is reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale, yet he is saturated with the laws of the world.
"We cannot close our eyes to these warning facts. They foretell the coming whirlwind of disaster. We may be sure that, if these things are allowed to continue without opposition, long before the close of the twentieth century, our agricultural people will be reduced individually to the abject serfdom of a houseless, homeless day-laborer.
Certain it is that it should not be poured into the victim in quantities limited only by the flask-contents of the bystanders. Several years ago I saw two interestingly contrasted cases of copperhead bite. The first patient was a powerful, full-blooded, temperate, Irish day-laborer who, while road-mending, was bitten on the back of the hand between two fingers.
I would not be without one for a single night. The only danger is, that you may rather make an idol of the hoe, and somewhat neglect your garden in explaining it, and fooling about with it. I almost think that, with one of these in the hands of an ordinary day-laborer, you might see at night where he had been working. Let us have peas. I have been a zealous advocate of the birds.
Yet as surely as that nothing perishes, that the Providence of God is not a patchwork of uncontinued efforts, but a plan and a progress, as surely as the Pilgrim embarkation at Delfshaven has a relation to the battle of Gettysburg, and to the civil rights bill giving the colored man permission to ride in a public conveyance and to be buried in a public cemetery, so surely has the Parthenon some connection with your new State capitol at Albany, and the daily life of the vine-dresser of the Peloponnesus some lesson for the American day-laborer.
It was the first time any one had offered to pay him, and it seemed to put him on a level with a common day-laborer. His first impulse was to resent it as a gratuitous humiliation, but a glance at Mrs. Van Kirk's countenance, which was all aglow with officious benevolence, re-assured him, and his indignation died away.
The other was Harrison, a retired pawnbroker, who had taken for wife the matron of the State Hospital for the Insane at Napa. Of all the persons of the city of Napa, and of all the other towns and villages in that rich and populous valley, she had been the only-survivor. Next, there were the three young men Cardiff and Hale, who had been farmers, and Wainwright, a common day-laborer.
For, though the wages of a day-laborer nowhere yield much more than his support and that of his family, they yield this in an uneconomical manner, a part of the sum earned being dropped on the way to middlemen, and a part going for whisky, sprees, blue Mondays, and illness arising out of bad situation, improper food, etc.
"Great God!" shouted Sheridan, and struck the desk a blow with his clenched fist. "A son of mine asks me that! You go out and ask the poorest day-laborer you can find! Ask him that question " "I did once," Bibbs interrupted; "when I was in the machine-shop. "Wha'd he say?" "He said, 'Oh, hell!" answered Bibbs, mildly. "Yes, I reckon he would!" Sheridan swung away from the desk.
The legal proprietor took over a good piece of work and got it for nothing, and Stonemason Jorgensen stood up in a pair of cracked wooden shoes, with a load of debts which he would never be able to shake off. Every one rejoiced to see him return to the existence of a day-laborer. But he did not submit quietly. He took to drink. From time to time he broke out and raged like the devil himself.
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