Another matter in which the English employee appears to me to err mightily is his treatment of his employer. In concerns of great magnitude personal relations between employer and employed are often impossible, because the employer seldom comes near the place where his money is made for him. Quite frequently, however, he is accessible; yet the employee knows him not. He would no more think of walking up and shaking hands with him than he would think of casting himself from the top of the factory chimney-stack. It is the unwritten law of the English that the employer is a better man than the employed. For the employee to say "How do!" to the employer; for the employee to meet the employer in the street and omit to make respectful obeisances; for the employee to assert anywhere outside his favourite pot-house that Jack's as good as his master, would never do. If you are paid wages, you must be grateful and respectful; and though you know quite well that your employer is paying you just as little as ever he can, you must still respect him. Broadly speaking, we manage these things better in Scotland; and, for that matter, the Scot manages them better in England. The English employee quirks and crawls before his employer, because he knows that his employer can exercise over him powers which, if they do not mean exactly life and death, do mean a possibly long period of out-of-workness. And out-of-workness is, as a rule, the most fearful thing in life that can happen to an Englishman, for the simple reason that he never has anything behind him. If he has been earning fifty pounds a year, he has spent it all; if he has been earning a thousand a year, he has spent it all and more to it. With the Scot it is different. No matter how small his earnings, he invariably contrives to save a portion of them. When he has saved a hundred pounds, he is practically an independent man, for a Scot with a hundred pounds at his disposal can defy, and can afford to defy, any employer that ever breathed the breath of life. Besides, hundred pounds or no hundred pounds, the Scot will not grovel. He does his work and his duty, and the rest can go hang. His days are not spent in blissful contemplation of the joys of being in good work; he has no anxieties as to how long it is going to last; he admits no superiorities; he is afraid of no man. Some day, perhaps, the Englishman will learn to take a leaf out of his book. The Englishman will learn that to be employed, excepting with a view to greater things than subsistence, is to be in a condition which borders very closely on degradation. He will learn that services rendered and energies expended for long periods of years without adequate reward, and with only a pretence at advancement, are a discredit and not an honour. He will learn that a man's a man, and that it is no man's business to be so faithful to another man that he cannot be faithful to himself. CHAPTER VI CHIFFON