This is
perfectly easy, because the American working-man, though singularly shrewd
and sensible in other respects, is the victim of an unaccountable
obliquity of vision which keeps him from seeing his real interests and
real friends--or, at least, from knowing them when he sees them.
There could be no doubt, I thought, in the mind of any reasonable person
that the walking delegate was the source of the discontent among our
proletariate, and I alleged him with a confidence which met the approval
of the professor, apparently, for he nodded, as if to say that I had hit
the nail on the head this time; and the minister seemed to be freshly
impressed with a notion that could not be new to him. The lawyer and the
doctor were silent, as if waiting for the banker to speak again; but he
was silent, too. The manufacturer, to my chagrin, broke into a laugh. "I'm
afraid," he said, with a sardonic levity which surprised me, "you'll have
to go a good deal deeper than the walking delegate. He's a symptom; he
isn't the disease. The thing keeps on and on, and it seems to be always
about wages; but it isn't about wages at the bottom.
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