In fact, I doubt whether you will
be doing well either by them or by yourself in going on their staff,
holding such views as you do."
"Do you? Then I'll tell them beforehand."
Mr. Vanney privately reflected that there was no need of this: _he_
intended to call up the editor-in-chief and suggest the unsuitability of
the candidate for a place, however humble, on the staff of a highly
respectable and suitably respectful daily.
Which he did. The message was passed on to Mr. Gordon, and, in his large
and tolerant soul, decently interred. One thing of which the managing
editor of The Ledger was not tolerant was interference from without in
his department.
Before allowing his man to leave, Mr. Vanney read him a long and
well-meant homily, full of warning and wisdom, and was both annoyed and
disheartened when, at the end of it, Banneker remarked:
"I'll dare you to take a car and spend twenty-four hours going about
Sippiac with me. If you stand for your system after that, I'll pay for
the car."
To which the other replied sadly that Banneker had in some manner
acquired a false and distorted view of industrial relations.
Therein, for once in an existence guided almost exclusively by
prejudice, Horace Vanney was right. At the outset of a new career to
which he was attuning his mind, Banneker had been injected into a
situation typical of all that is worst in American industrial life, a
local manufacturing enterprise grown rich upon the labor of underpaid
foreigners, through the practice of all the vicious, lawless, and
insidious methods of an ingrown autocracy, and had believed it to be
fairly representative.
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