Learning and Suffering in Vienna
The peasant boy who goes to the metropolis—drawn by supposedly or actually easier work and shorter hours, but chiefly by the brilliant light which a great city does give off—is accustomed to a certain amount of security. He has never left one place without having another at least in prospect. Finally, the shortage of farm labor is great, and the probability of continued unemployment therefore very slight. Now it is a mistake to think that the young fellow who goes to the metropolis is naturally made of baser stuff than the one who goes on taking an honest living from the soil. No, quite the contrary—experience shows that emigrant groups are more likely than not to be made up of the healthiest and most energetic individuals. And these “emigrants” include not only the man who goes to America but also the young farm hand who leaves his native village to move to the distant metropolis. He too is prepared for an uncertain fate. Usually he comes to town with some money, so that he need not despair the very first day if ill luck does not bring him work at once. But things are worse if he soon loses a job he has found. Finding a new job is especially difficult, if not impossible, in winter. The first few weeks are still tolerable. He receives unemployment benefits from his union, and makes his way as best he can. But when his last penny is gone, and he has been out of work so long that the union ceases to pay benefits—then comes the real pinch. He wanders hungrily about, perhaps pawns and sells his last possessions; thus his clothes grew fewer and worse, and drag him down externally into surroundings which corrupt him not only physically but spiritually. If on top of this he becomes homeless, and that (as is often the case) in winter, his suffering is really intense. At last he finds some sort of work again. But the game begins all over again. He is hit a second time; the third time it may be yet worse, so that gradually he learns indifference to his perpetual insecurity. At length the repetition becomes a habit.
Thus an otherwise hard-working man’s whole attitude toward life grows slack, and gradually matures him into a tool of those who will merely use him for their own base advantage. He has been unemployed so often through no fault of his own that one
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