We are nearing the season of the year when the society columns of the newspapers will report that "everybody is out of town." "Everybody!" What a world of impertinence and aristocratic insolence there is in that word! Yet no phrase is more commonly used on the piazzas and lawns and beaches and golf links of our fashionable summer resorts.
As a matter of fact, the whole great city goes straight along thru the year, taking no heed of heat and cold, rains or droughts. All its myriad enterprises move along as if there were no differences of weather or seasons.
Every street is as busy in the summer as it was in the winter. Not a single trolley car has been taken from the rails. Every egg-box tenement is packed as full as ever. Every shop and mill and factory and store is as busy with its ordinary activities as if the thermometer registered fifty instead of ninety degrees.
All thru the sweltering days of June, July, and August, when even at the cool beaches the idle pleasure-seekers are gasping for breath and wishing themselves in Labrador, when the city has become a great oven of brick and stone, there are still apparently as many workers as ever jostling one another on the street cars and in the over-heated buildings.
The truth is that those who leave the city for the summer are in most cases not missed. The fashionable set is only a handful of dudes and dolls, who can come and go whenever they please without having any effect upon the serious work of the world.
Strictly speaking, they are the nobodies of our cities. They do no useful work and their relation to the real worker is about the same as that of the potato-bug to the potato. They are nobodies, yet such is this queer social system of ours that if it were not for them the useful workers would not have to work so hard and so long during the hot summer months. There would be shorter hours and vacations for all. — Boyce's Weekly -- reprinted in "The American Cooperator."
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