The People's Train Read Online Free PDF Page A

difference between the sentiments of syndicalists like them and Marxists like me that afternoon.
    Workers of the world, awaken!
    Break your chains, demand your rights.
    All the wealth you make is taken
    By exploiting parasites.
    Shall you kneel in deep submission
    From your cradles to your graves?
    We were really belting it out. Kelly the Irish tenor, O’Sullivan the baritone, Hope Mockridge the contralto, and many of the others stuck creakily between registers.
    Is the height of your ambition
    To be good and willing slaves?
    Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!
    Fight for your emancipation;
    Arise, ye slaves of every nation.
    In one union grand!
    Our little ones for bread are crying...
    And now the door opened. There was a woman of about thirty-five standing there, flushed in the face.
    I’m sorry, miss, said Hope Mockridge. They always send the workers out against the workers.
    The delegation on the stairs laughed.
    The woman said, Could you all come into the waiting room, please? Mr Bender will be with you in a second.
    We crowded in, and the flushed woman returned to her seat behind a desk and buried her head in a journal. Beyond frosted glass beside her desk we could hear the chatter of typewriters. A door from the inner office opened and there, without intermediaries or lieutenants, was Mr Bender. He was a tall man, and he did not look happy. Immediately Hope Mockridge spoke to him.
    What game are you up to, Freeman? This won’t do you any good.
    I wouldn’t have expected to see you here, Mrs Mockridge. With the rabble.
    No one could laugh as quickly as Mrs Mockridge if she wanted to.
    With the rabble? she asked. Oh, you were always a master of the language.
    Why are you a traitor to your kind? asked Bender, angry and stupid enough to concentrate his chagrin on this one vocal woman. What does your husband think of this?
    I didn’t ask him. But you’re quite right – class traitor I am! But, Freeman, surely you are here to deal with our forty-three union representatives. Shall we leave my chastising to private moments?
    And who should I speak to? asked Mr Bender.
    Kelly said, I’m here. Charlie Kelly. The Trades and Labour Council.
    Bender turned his gaze on Kelly as if he had not known of his existence until now. Clearly he saw Kelly not as the spokesman for the desires and aspirations of workers, but as some sort of accidental opportunist who had found himself a niche. Both readings were correct in a sense, but Bender faced nothing but defeat playing according to the second of these versions.
    Kelly exhorted him to accept unionism and union representation within his depots and workshops. A unionised worker was a happier worker, he said. A happy worker was a productive worker. The entire unionised workforce of Queensland, said Kelly, wanted the tramway unionised as well and brought into the twentieth century, and the unions of Queensland would bring on a general strike if Mr Bender did not permit it. Mr Bender’s own business associates would not be happy at such a prospect.
    It was gratifying to me as a jumped-up peasant and railway worker to discover that management are as uniformly foolish as we would like to depict them – just as owned by their narrow interest as the poor are by their hunger.
    Mr Bender said, I am on record as being opposed to unionism on principle. And on principle, I will not let it operate within my workshops and depots.
    Without unionism, Kelly asked, how are your men to ask for better conditions?
    Man to man, said Mr Bender. Face to face.
    You mean slave to master, Mr Bender?
    You paint the picture any way you like.
    Some men groaned. Amelia Pethick had recovered her breath and found her voice. She called in a fluting manner, Your relationship to your workers is too unequal, Mr Bender. It’s a machine against flesh. You know that.
    More slumming ladies, Mrs Pethick, said Bender.
    It was a further mistake of his to attack an old favourite of the crowd’s.
    Shame, Freeman, shame! said