of disease, especially to the young," he built twenty-four baths, at a
cost of $35,000, and public wash-houses. These are supplied with three
steam engines and six washing machines. Each person bringing clothes is
provided with a rubbing and boiling tub, into which steam and hot and
cold water are conveyed by pipes. The clothes are dried by hot air, and
can be washed, dried, mangled, and folded in an hour. In Sweden, I found
the same dislike to having washing done in the homes, and clothes are
usually carried to the public wash-houses.
Perhaps the most interesting of all Mr. Salt's gifts to his workmen is
the Saltaire Club and Institute, costing $125,000; a handsome building,
with large reading-room supplied with daily papers and current
literature, a library, lecture-hall for eight hundred persons, a "School
of Art," with models, drawings, and good teachers, a billiard-room with
four tables, a room for scientific study, each student having proper
appliances for laboratory work, a gymnasium and drill-room nearly sixty
feet square, an armory for rifle-practice, and a smoking-room, though
Mr. Salt did not smoke. The membership fee for all this study and
recreation is only thirty seven cents for each three months. Opposite
the great mill is a dining-hall, where a plate of meat can be purchased
for four cents, a bowl of soup for two cents, and a cup of tea or coffee
for one cent. If the men prefer to bring their own food, it is cooked
free of charge. The manager has a fixed salary, so that there is no
temptation to scrimp the buyers.
Still another gift was made to the work-people; a park of fourteen
acres, with croquet and archery grounds, music pavilion, places for
boating and swimming, and walks with beautiful flowers. No saloon has
ever been allowed in Saltaire. Without the temptation of the beer-shops,
the boys have grown to intelligent manhood, and the girls to virtuous
womanhood. Sir Titus Salt's last gift to his workmen was a Sunday-school
building costing $50,000, where are held the "model Sunday schools of
the country," say those who have attended the meetings. No wonder, at
the death of this man, 40,000 people came to his burial,--members of
Parliament, clergymen, workingmen's unions, and ragged schools. No
wonder that statues have been erected to his memory, and that thousands
go every year to Saltaire, to see what one capitalist has done for his
laborers. No fear of strikes in his workshops; no socialism talked in
the clean and pretty homes of the men; no squalid poverty, no depraving
ignorance.
That capital is feeling its responsibility in this matter of homes for
laborers is one of the hopeful signs of the times. We shall come,
sometime, to believe with the late President Chadbourne, "The rule now
commonly acted upon is that business must be cared for, and men must
care for themselves. The principle of action, in the end, must be that
_men must be cared for_, and business must be subservient to this great
work."
If, as Spurgeon has well said, "Home is the grandest of all
institutions," capital can do no better work than look to the homes of
the laborer. It is not the mansion which the employer builds for
himself, but the home which he builds for his employe, which will insure
a safe country for his children to dwell in. If discontent and poverty
surround his palace, its foundations are weak; if intelligence has been
disseminated, and comfort promoted by his unselfish thought for others,
then he leaves a goodly heritage for his children.
JOSEPH MARIE JACQUARD.
The small world which lives in elegant houses knows little of the great
world in dingy apartments with bare walls and empty cupboards. Those who
walk or ride in the sunshine often forget the darkness of the mines, or
the tiresome treadmill of the factories.
Over a century ago, in Lyons, France, lived a man who desired to make
the lives of the toilers brighter and happier. Joseph Jacquard, the son
of a silk-weaver who died early, began his young manhood, the owner of
two looms and a comfortable little home. He had married Claudine
Boichon, the daughter of a goldsmith who expected to give his daughter a
marriage portion, but was unable from loss of property. Jacquard loved
her just as devotedly, however, as though she had brought him money. A
pretty boy was born into their home, and no family was happier in all
France. But the young loom-owner saw the poor weavers working from four
in the morning till nine at night, in crowded rooms, whole families
often bending over a loom, their chests shrunken and their cheeks
sallow from want of air and sunlight; and their faces dull and vacant
from the monotony of unvaried toil. There were no holidays, no walks in
the fields among the flowers, no reading of books, nothing but the
constant routine which wore out body and mind together. There was no
home-life; little children grew pinched and old; and mothers went too
early to their graves. If work stopped, they ate the bread of charity,
and went to the almshouse. The rich people of Lyons were not
hard-hearted, but they did not _think_; they were too busy with their
parties and their marriages; too busy buying and selling that they might
grow richer. But Jacquard was always thinking how he could lighten the
labor of the silk-weavers by some invention.
The manufacture of silk had become a most important industry. Seventeen
hundred years before Christ the Chinese had discovered the making of
silk from silk-worms, and had cultivated mulberry-trees. They forbade
anybody to export the eggs or to disclose the process of making the
fabric, under penalty of death. The Roman Emperor Justinian determined
to wrest this secret from China, and thus revive the resources of his
empire. He sent two monks, who ostensibly preached Christianity, but in
reality studied silk-worms, and, secreting some eggs in two hollow
reeds, returned to Justinian, and breaking these canes, laid the eggs on
the lap of the beautiful Empress Theodora. From this the art spread into
Italy, and thence into France.
The more Jacquard thought how he could help the silk-weavers of France
the more he became absorbed, and forgot that money was needed to support
his family. Soon the looms had to be sold at auction, with his small
home. The world ridiculed, and his relatives blamed him; but Claudine
his wife encouraged him, and prophesied great fame for him in the
future. She sold her little treasures, and even her bed, to pay his
debts. Finally, when there was no food in the house, with tears in his
eyes, Jacquard left his wife and child, to become a laborer for a
lime-burner in a neighboring town. Claudine went to work in a
straw-bonnet factory; and for sixteen years they battled with poverty.
Then the French Revolution burst upon Lyons in 1793. Her crime before
such murderers as Robespierre and Marat was that she was the friend of
Louis XVI. Sixty thousand men were sent against her by the so-called
Republicans, who were commanded to utterly destroy her, and write over
the ruins, "Lyons made war upon liberty; Lyons is no more." Six thousand
persons were put to death, their houses burned, and twelve thousand
exiled; among them Jacquard.
His only child, a brave boy of sixteen, had joined the Republican ranks,
that he might fight against the foreign armies of England, Austria, and
Naples, who had determined, under Pitt, to crush out the new government.
At the boy's earnest request his father enlisted with him, and together
they marched toward the Rhine. In one of the first battles a
cannon-ball struck the idolized son, who fell expiring in Jacquard's
arms. Covered with the blood of his only child, he dug a grave for him
on the battle-field; and exhausted and heart-broken went to the hospital
till his discharge was obtained.
He returned to Lyons and sought his poor wife. At last he found her in
the outskirts of the city, living in a hay-loft, and earning the barest
pittance by spreading out linen for the laundresses to dry. She divided
her crusts with her husband, while they wept together over their
irreparable loss. She soon died of grief, but, with her last words, bade
Jacquard go forward in developing his genius, and have trust in God, who
would yet show him the way of success. Blessed Claudine! A sweet,
beautiful soul, shining like a star in the darkness of the French
Revolution.
Jacquard with all earthly ties severed went back to the seclusion of
inventing. After his day's work was done as a laborer, he studied on his
machine for silk-weaving. Finally, after seven years,--a long time to
patiently develop an idea,--he had produced a loom which would decrease
the number of workmen at each machine, by one person. The model was
placed at the Paris Industrial Exposition in 1801; and the maker was
awarded a bronze medal. In gratitude for this discovery he went to the
image of the Virgin which stood on a high hill, and for nine days
ascended daily the steps of the sacred place. Then he returned to his
work, and seating himself before a Vaucanson loom, which contained the
germ of his own, he consecrated himself anew to the perfecting of his
invention.
Jacques de Vaucanson, who died when Jacquard was thirty years old, was
one of the most celebrated mechanicians of France. His automatons were
the wonder of the age. He exhibited a duck which, when moved, ate and
drank like a live one. The figure would stretch out its neck for food,
and swallow it: walk, swim, dabble in the water, and quack most
naturally. His musician, playing the flageolet with the left hand, and
beating the tambourine with the right, executing many pieces of
difficult music with great accuracy, was an astonishment to every body.
He had been appointed inspector of silk-factories at Lyons, and, because
he made some improvements in machines, he was pelted with stones by the
workmen, who feared that they would thereby lose their labor. He
revenged himself by making a machine which wove, brocaded, and colored
at the same time, and was worked by a donkey!
It remained for Jacquard to make the Vaucanson loom of the utmost
practical use to Lyons and to the world. After a time he was not only
able to dispense with one workman at each loom, but he made machinery do
the work of three men and two women at each frame. The city authorities
sent a model of this machine to Paris, that the Emperor Napoleon might
examine it. So pleased was he that he at once sent for Jacquard to come
to Paris. The latter had previously invented a machine for making
fishing-nets, now used in producing Nottingham lace. When brought before
Bonaparte, and Carnot the Minister of the Interior, the latter asked,
"Is it you then, who pretend to do a thing which is impossible for
man,--to make a knot upon a tight thread?"
Jacquard answered the brusque inquiry by setting up a machine, and
letting the incredulous minister see for himself.
The Emperor made Jacquard welcome to the _Conservatoire des Arts et
Metiers_, where he could study books and machines to his heart's
content, and gave him a pension of about twelve hundred dollars for his
discovery. When he had, with his own hands, woven a magnificent brocaded
silk dress for the Empress Josephine, he returned to Lyons to set up the
Jacquard looms. His name began to be lauded everywhere. Claudine's
prophecies had at last come true. She had given her life to help him;
but she could not live to share his honors.
Soon, however, the tide of praise turned. Whole families found
themselves forced into the street for lack of work, as the looms were
doing what their hands had done. Bands of unemployed men were shouting,
"Behold the traitor! Let him provide for our wives and children now
driven as mendicants from door to door; or let him, the destroyer of
the peoples' labor, share in the death which he has prepared for us!"
The authorities seemed unable to quell the storm, and by their orders
the new loom was broken in pieces on the public square. "The iron," says
Jacquard, "was sold as old iron; the wood, for fuel." One day he was
seized by a crowd of starving workmen, who knocked him down, and dragged
him to the banks of the Rhone, where he would have been drowned at once,
had not the police rescued him, bleeding and nearly dead. He left the
city overwhelmed with astonishment and sorrow. Soon Switzerland,
Germany, Italy, and America were using the Jacquard looms, largely
increasing the manufacture and sale of silk, and therefore the number of
laborers. The poor men of Lyons awoke to the sad fact, that by breaking
up Jacquard's machines, they had put the work of silk-weaving into other
hands all over the world; and idleness was proving their ruin. They
might have doubled and trebled the number of their factories, and
benefited labor a thousand-fold.
The inventor refused to take out a patent for himself, nor would he
accept any offers made him by foreigners, because he thought all his
services belonged to France. He loved the working people, who, for
twenty years, were too blind to see it.
He removed to a little home and garden at Oullins, near Lyons, the use
of which had been given him for life, where he could hear the sound of
his precious looms on which he had worked for sixty years, and which
his city had at last adopted. Here he attended his garden, and went
every morning to early church, distributing each day some small pieces
of money to poor children. As old age came on, Lyons realized the
gratitude due her great inventor. A silver medal was awarded him, and
then the grand distinction of the cross of the Legion of Honor.
People from the neighboring towns visited Oullins, and pointed out with
pride the noble old man at eighty-four, sitting by his garden-wall,
dressed like a workman in his long black tunic, but wearing his broad
red ribbon with his cross of honor. Illustrious travellers and statesmen
visited him whose fame was now spread through Europe and America.
Toinette, a faithful servant who had known and loved Claudine, watched
over the pure-hearted Jacquard till death came, Aug. 7, 1834. Six years
after, Lyons, which once broke his machine and nearly killed him, raised
a beautiful statue of him in the public square. The more than seventy
thousand looms in the city, employing two hundred thousand workmen, are
grander monuments even than the statue. The silk-weavers are better
housed and fed than formerly. The struggling, self-sacrificing man, who
might have been immensely rich as well as famous, was an untold blessing
to labor and to the world.
HORACE GREELEY.
Among the hills of New Hampshire, in a lonely, unpainted house, Horace
Greeley was born, Feb. 3, 1811, the third of seven children. His father
was a plain farmer, hard-working, yet not very successful, but aided by
a wife of uncommon energy and good spirits, notwithstanding her many
cares. Besides her housework, and spinning, and making the children's
clothes, she hoed in the garden, raked and loaded hay to help her
husband, laughing and singing all day long, and telling her feeble
little son, Horace, stories and legends all the evening. Her first two
children having died, this boy was especially dear. Mrs. Greeley was a
great reader of such books as she could obtain, and remembered all she
read. It requires no great discernment to see from whence Horace Greeley
derived his intense love for reading, and his boundless energy.
[Illustration: HORACE GREELEY.]
He learned to read, one can scarcely tell how. When two years old, he
would pore over the Bible, as he lay on the floor, and ask questions
about the letters; at three, he went to the "district school," often
carried through the deep snow on the shoulders of one of his aunts, or
on the back of an older boy. He soon stood at the head of his little
class in spelling and reading, "and took it so much to heart when he did
happen to lose his place, that he would cry bitterly; so that some boys,
when they had gained the right to get above him, declined the honor,
because it hurt Horace's feelings so."
Before he was six years old he had read the Bible through, and
"Pilgrim's Progress." Their home contained only about twenty books, and
these he read and re-read. As he grew older, every book within seven
miles was borrowed, and perused after the hard day's work of farming was
over. He gathered a stock of pine knots, and, lighting one each night,
lay down by the hearth, and read, oblivious to all around him. The
neighbors came and made their friendly visits, and ate apples and drank
cider, as was the fashion, but the lad never noticed their coming or
their going. When really forced to leave his precious books for bed, he
would repeat the information he had learned, or the lessons for the next
day, to his brother, who usually, most ungraciously, fell asleep before
the conversation was half completed.
When Horace was nearly ten years old, his father, who had speculated in
a small way in lumber, became a bankrupt; his house and furniture were
sold by the sheriff, and he was obliged to flee from the State to avoid
arrest. Some of these debts were paid, thirty years afterward, by his
noble son. Going to Westhaven, Vt., Mr. Greeley obtained work on a farm,
and moved his family thither. They were very poor, the children sitting
on the floor and eating their porridge together out of a tin pan; but
they were happy in the midst of their hard work and plain food. The
father and the boys chopped logs, and the little sisters, with the
mother, gathered them in heaps, the voice of the latter, says Mr. James
Parton, in his biography, "ringing out in laughter from the tangled
brushwood in which she was often buried." Would there were thousands
more of such women, who can laugh at disaster, and keep their children
and themselves from getting soured with life. Everybody has troubles;
and very wise are they who do not tell them, either in their faces or by
their words.
Horace earned a few pennies all his own; sometimes by selling nuts, or
bundles of the roots of pitch-pine for kindling, which he carried on his
back to the store. This money he spent in books, buying Mrs. Hemans's
poetry and "Shakspeare." No wonder that the minister of the town said,
"Mark my words; that boy was not made for nothing."
He could go to school no longer, and must now support himself. From
earliest childhood he had determined to be a printer; so, when eleven
years of age, he walked nine miles to see the publisher of a newspaper,
and obtain a situation. The editor looked at the small, tow-haired boy,
shook his head, and said, "You are too young." With a heavy heart the
child walked the long nine miles back again. But he must do something;
and, a little later, with seventy-five cents in his pocket, and some
food tied in a bundle, which he hung on the end of a stick, slung over
his shoulder, he walked one hundred and twenty miles back to New
Hampshire, to see his relatives. After some weeks he returned, with a
few more cents in his purse than when he started!
The father Greeley ought to have foreseen that such energy and will
would produce results; but because Horace, in a fit of abstraction,
tried to yoke the "off" ox on the "near" side, he said, "Ah! that boy
will never get along in the world. He'll never know more than enough to
come in when it rains." Alas! for the blindness of Zaccheus Greeley,
whose name even would not be remembered but for his illustrious son.
When Horace was fourteen, he read in a newspaper that an apprentice was
wanted in a printing-office eleven miles distant. He hastened thither,
and, though unprepossessing, from his thin voice, short pantaloons, lack
of stockings, and worn hat, he was hired on trial. The first day he
worked at the types in silence. Finally the boys began to tease him with
saucy remarks, and threw type at him; but he paid no attention. On the
third day, one of the apprentices took a large black ball, used to put
ink on the type, and remarking that Horace's hair was too light, daubed
his head four times. The pressman and editor both stopped their labors
to witness a fight; but they were disappointed, for the boy never turned
from his work. He soon left his desk, spent an hour in washing the ink
from his hair, and returned to his duties. Seeing that he could not be
irritated, and that he was determined to work, he became a great
favorite.
When at his type, he would often compose paragraphs for the paper,
setting up the words without writing them out. He soon joined a debating
society, composed of the best-informed persons of the little town of
East Poultney,--the minister, the doctor, the lawyer, the
schoolteachers, and the like. What was their surprise to find that the
young printer knew almost every thing, and was always ready to speak, or
read an essay.
He was often laughed at because of his poor clothes, and pitied because,
slender and pale as he was, he never wore an overcoat; but he used to
say, "I guess I'd better wear my old clothes than run in debt for new
ones." Ah! they did not know that every penny was saved and sent to the
father, struggling to clear a farm in the wilderness in Pennsylvania.
During his four years' apprenticeship he visited his parents twice,
though six hundred miles distant, and walked most of the way.
Soon after he had learned his trade, the newspaper suspended, and he was
thrown out of work. The people with whom he boarded gave him a brown
overcoat, not new, and with moistened eyes said good-by to the poor
youth whom they had learned to love as their own. He remained a few
weeks with his family, then walked fifty miles east to a town in New
York State, where he found plenty of work, but no money, and in six
weeks returned to the log-cabin. After trying various towns, he found a
situation in Erie, taking the place of a workman who was ill, and for
seven months he did not lose a day. Out of his wages--eighty-four
dollars--he had used only six, less than one dollar a mouth! Putting
fifteen dollars in his pocket, he took the balance of sixty-three in a
note, and gave it to his father. A noble son indeed, who would not buy a
single garment for himself, but carried the money home, so as to make
the poor ones a trifle more comfortable!
He had become tired of working in the small towns; he determined to go
to the great city of New York, and "be somebody." He walked a part of
the way by the tow-path along the canal, and sometimes rode in a scow.
Finally, at sunrise, Friday, Aug. 18, 1831, he landed close to the
Battery, with ten dollars in his pocket, knowing, he says, "no human
being within two hundred miles." His first need was a boarding-place.
Over a saloon, kept by an Irishman, he found room and board for two
dollars and a half a week. Fortunately, though it was the almost
universal custom to use liquors, Horace was a teetotaler, and despised
chewing or smoking tobacco, which he regarded "as the vilest, most
detestable abuse of his corrupted sensual appetites whereof depraved man
is capable;" therefore he had no fear of temptation from these sources.
All day Friday and Saturday he walked the streets of New York, looking
for work. The editor of the "Journal of Commerce" told him plainly that
he was a runaway apprentice from the country, and he did not want him.
"I returned to my lodging on Saturday evening, thoroughly weary,
disheartened, disgusted with New York, and resolved to shake its dust
from my feet next Monday morning, while I could still leave with money
in my pocket, and before its almshouse could foreclose upon me." On
Sunday he went to church, both morning and afternoon. Late in the day, a
friend who called upon the owner of the house, learning that the printer
wanted work, said he had heard of a vacancy at Mr. West's, 85 Chatham
Street.
The next morning Horace was at the shop at half-past five! New York was
scarcely awake; even the newsboys were asleep in front of the paper
offices. He waited for an hour and a half,--a day, it seemed to
him,--when one of the journey-men arrived, and, finding the door locked,
sat down beside the stranger. He, too, was a Vermonter, and he
determined to help young Greeley, if possible. He took him to the
foreman, who decided to try him on a Polyglot Testament, with marginal
references, such close work that most of the men refused to do it. Mr.
West came an hour or two later, and said, in anger, "Did you hire that
fool?"
"Yes; we need help, and he was the best I could get," said the foreman.
"Well, pay him off to-night, and let him go about his business."