Does not underpaid labor, outside the mechanical arts, frequently improve its own condition? Yes, frequently. Well, how? Why, by using its brains. If it were to insist that its whole duty was done when its daily work was over the public would laugh at it. The clerk, the teacher, the salesman considers it his duty to continually improve himself in order to be fit for such opportunities as may arise. A man in any one of these positions who would spend his non-working hours in indulgence, carelessness, or, worse still, at the nearest beer-shop, would be considered by his employers as unfit for confidence and by his associates as a man who never would rise. If such men are so badly paid, so severely worked, yet are skilful enough to rise from the low financial level upon which their work places them, why should not the laboring class in general rise in the same manner? It is useless to say they cannot, because thousands upon thousands have done it for years. It has already been said that the mechanics of a few years ago are the employers and managers of to-day. A great deal more might be said in the same direction, for there are great mills, factories and industries of the United States to-day controlled by men who were merely poor laborers at day wages a few years ago. The question is not one of a class or of an industry; it is entirely one of individual manhood, and the man stands or falls by himself. The more he depends upon an association or his fellow-men the less strength there is in himself to resist injury or to make his way upward. CHAPTER XII. SELF-HELP FOR LABOR. If the laboring man doesn’t want to be in a state of slavery, he must refrain from putting himself into chains. He is a good deal like the rest of us; he always blames somebody else for his condition. He won’t be able to get out of trouble until he lays most of the blame on himself. If a man feels obliged to enter into business relations with a lion he does not begin by putting his head into the animal’s mouth. If a workingman begins life with the belief, which seems prevalent now, that all employers will enslave a man if they can, he should not allow himself to be in such condition that he cannot take care of himself. Why, even a dog or a cat going into a strange room spends its first moments in looking around to see how it can get out again in case of necessity. Employers as a class have so many sins to answer for that there will be lively times for them on judgment day, I suppose, but that is no reason why the employee should be a fool. If a [Illustration: AGRICULTURAL BUILDING.] man sticks a knife into you, and is sent to State’s prison for it, his sentence punishes him, but it does not pay your doctor’s bill, or make up to you what you have lost in time and money while you have been lying in bed under the surgeon’s care.