Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/479

THE

DIAL

HE got the position which he had coveted so long, worked for so long, and so well deserved: but, the position obtained, he was born again, a different blood began to course through his veins, and another brain began to function in his head.

He was converted from being a person liable to dismissal into being a person having power to dismiss: as wonderful a change, perhaps, as the spiritual one which turns a sinner into something we call a saint, or sends a man flying away from the public house towards which he used to fly.

He had performed all the deeds of kindness and meanness which the average man commits. He had aided and been jolly with his equals and inferiors, he had been obliging and flattering to his more distant superiors: but against his immediate superior in every grade he had conducted a bitter unceasing war of subterranean strategy, tale-bearing, and worse, which ceased only when he occupied the position which the other had occupied, and turned his mind to the destruction of the person who was now his direct officer.

What saps he had digged and with what care he had laid the mine! What explosions had accompanied his advance, and what a number of men had by his machinery been blown as completely out of their jobs as if they had been thrown through a roof or a window!

Speaking generally the man who loses his employment loses all that was contemporary with it, including his spirit, including the right to wish to get even with his supplanter, for the centuries of wage receiving and business ethics have moulded the human being to their own convention. The movement of wages, the insecurity