_A FEW PRACTICAL FACTS FOR SENATOR EDMUNDS._
I am a physician practising in a small manufacturing town, and am
doing very well so far as getting business goes--might even be able to
save a little money if it were not for the bad debts. They make my
income pretty small, considering the amount of hard work I am
compelled to do; and the time spent in endeavoring to collect my bills
takes a great many hours which, in justice to my patients who pay,
ought to be used in brushing up my medical studies and trying to keep
abreast with the rest of the profession.
It is hard to get out of a warm bed at night and tramp off a mile or
so to look after a patient when you are not certain of ever getting
your pay, and it seems to grow worse instead of better. The number of
people who, because of their poverty, need a doctor the most are on
the increase; and yet so long as they are not poor because of vicious
habits, one really hasn't the heart to refuse when called upon. I hear
a great deal said about the prosperity of the workingman and the high
wages he receives, but observe as a matter of experience that only a
few are able to save enough to carry them through a few weeks'
illness, let alone paying the doctor, who is forced to wait months and
sometimes even years for his pay, getting it then a dollar or two at a
time.
To be sure, some of my patients own homes of their own, but the most
of them are in debt, a mortgage being about as regular an attachment
to a workingman's house as a chimney.
Wages, too, are not quite so high as they were when I began practice:
they fell pretty low at one time, and then, when human nature could
endure it no longer, came a strike. The employers were horrified;
there never had been a strike in this town before: the working men,
women, and children all received high wages. "There is John Smith, for
instance--earns eighty dollars a month. There is Miss Jones, who makes
two dollars a day. There are some who earn even more." True enough!
But one day I was called to see John Smith lying dead on his kitchen
floor; fell dead on coming home from work, died in the harness, worked
to death; a young man at that, and ought to have been good for twenty
years more. His employers wouldn't have allowed one of their horses to
work that way.
I remember the first time I ever saw Miss Jones--a bright, pretty,
red-cheeked girl, fresh from the country and proud to think that she
could earn her own living; to-day you would not recognize her, bent,
haggard, and worn; the rosy cheeks all gone; and the sunken chest and
hollow cough too plainly prophesy the end is not far off. High wages?
Yes! for flesh and blood are cheap.
Well, the strikers compromised, got a raise in wages of five per
cent., with pay once a month instead of half at the end of the month,
and the balance at the end of the year, as had been the custom. Most
of the employers gave up the "pluck-me store" system, and we had
better times.
Every year there comes family after family, all skilled working men
and women, from over the ocean, and I begin to see men standing on the
street corners looking for work, while every now and then one of the
employers will cut down wages a little in some department of his
factory.
I see the men and boys who were born here crowded out of their places
by the imported labor, leaving town, and later hear of them beginning
life over again in some western village, or taking up government lands
on the prairies. If it were not for the emigration out of the town,
wages would scarce be enough to support life, so fast does immigration
to the town keep up with the demand for labor.
The place used to be full of little shops, and the business was
conducted by hundreds of small manufacturers who were but one remove
from their men; in fact, it was no uncommon thing for a man to begin
manufacturing for himself on the savings from two or three years'
labor.
But now these small shops are used as tenements, and a dozen large
firms do nearly all the business, crowding the few small manufacturers
that are left closer and closer to the wall every year. This is
because much of our raw stock has to be imported: we can make only a
few kinds of our class of goods in this country. The large
manufacturer, who is generally an importer also, is thus able to offer
a full line of goods to the jobber, which the smaller fry can't do.
The business is a highly protected industry, the people being taxed by
a tariff of fifty per cent to support it.
In this connection a few figures may prove instructive:
The total value of gloves manufactured during the
census year was $5,718,539
For making which, labor received as wages 1,245,013 or 22%
And the raw material cost 3,404,937
Leaving a surplus to the manufacturers of 1,068,589 or 23%
Yet their capital invested was only 2,690,048
The tariff of fifty per cent is sufficient therefore to enable the
manufacturer to pay, not the difference in wages between European
labor and American, but _all_ the wages and twenty-eight cents on the
dollar's worth of finished product besides; while--there being no
tariff on labor--foreign labor comes to compete with home labor just
so fast as the difference in wages will warrant the making of the
journey from the old country to the new.
The tariff on gloves in an unfinished state is, however, but twenty
per cent, and at that rate many gloves are imported so nearly finished
as to require but little labor to fit them for the market: and here
the large dealer who imports is able to obtain another serious
advantage over the small dealer, and at the same time, while
pretending to protect labor, defraud it.
The closing of the small shops, and the consequent driving of our
people into large factories, hurts the best skilled workman in that it
lessens the number of employers competing for his services. I have
been a protectionist in the past, for I was taught to believe that
protection raised wages; but the results of a careful inquiry as to
cause and effect have shown me pretty conclusively that it does not
and can not.
I have talked with many workingmen who are beginning to perceive that
the tendency of wages to fall a little from time to time is due to the
competition of the "pauper labor of Europe," which coming to this
country, underbids them at the shop door, takes away their work, and
turns them out to shift for themselves; while the employer, who is
protected by a duty of fifty per cent, gets his labor in the lowest
market and sells his goods in the highest.
Said a glove-cutter to me the other day: "Doctor, if all the
workingmen born and brought up here and all that have come from the
old country had remained here, wages would not be fifty cents a day. I
understand very well what keeps wages up in America: it's the great
West, with its free land acting as a safety valve; and the worst is
that so much of it has been given to railroads or sold to cattle
syndicates for a mere song. When the remaining free land is
appropriated, God help the workingman!
"Yes, we're protected in all that we have to buy: food, clothing, and
shelter, in a way that increases the cost to us; but in what we have
to sell, our labor, we have no protection at all. They give us good
wages, for if they did not we would emigrate to the West and leave
them, and by reason of this confounded tariff they put up the price of
all we need so high that wages, measured by their purchasing power,
are not so large after all. If the difference in real wages was so
great as the protectionists claim, there would be more immigrants
coming from Europe in one day than do now in a year."
The workingmen have been educating themselves in the last four years,
and are no longer to be deceived by superficial comparisons of the
differences in wages between countries; they will also examine into
the differences in conditions, productive power, and the like, which
the protectionist statistician omits to do.