_Question_. What, in your opinion, is the condition of labor in
this country as compared with that abroad?
_Answer_. In the first place, it is self-evident that if labor
received more in other lands than in this the tide of emigration
would be changed. The workingmen would leave our shores. People
who believe in free trade are always telling us that the laboring
man is paid much better in Germany than in the United States, and
yet nearly every ship that comes from Germany is crammed with
Germans, who, for some unaccountable reason, prefer to leave a
place where they are doing well and come to one where they must do
worse.
The same thing can be said of Denmark and Sweden, of England,
Scotland, Ireland and of Italy. The truth is, that in all those
lands the laboring man can earn just enough to-day to do the work
of to-morrow; everything he earns is required to get food enough
in his body and rags enough on his back to work from day to day,
to toil from week to week. There are only three luxuries within
his reach--air, light, and water; probably a fourth might be added
--death.
In those countries the few own the land, the few have the capital,
the few make the laws, and the laboring man is not a power. His
opinion in neither asked nor heeded. The employers pay as little
as they can. When the world becomes civilized everybody will want
to pay what things are worth, but now capital is perfectly willing
that labor shall remain at the starvation line. Competition on
every hand tends to put down wages. The time will come when the
whole community will see that justice is economical. If you starve
laboring men you increase crime; you multiply, as they do in England,
workhouses, hospitals and all kinds of asylums, and these public
institutions are for the purpose of taking care of the wrecks that
have been produced by greed and stinginess and meanness--that is
to say, by the ignorance of capital.
_Question_. What effect has the protective tariff on the condition
of labor in this country?
_Answer_. To the extent that the tariff keeps out the foreign
article it is a direct protection to American labor. Everything
in this country is on a larger scale than in any other. There is
far more generosity among the manufacturers and merchants and
millionaires and capitalists of the United States than among those
of any other country, although they are bad enough and mean enough
here.
But the great thing for the laboring man in the United States is
that he is regarded as a man. He is a unit of political power.
His vote counts just as much as that of the richest and most
powerful. The laboring man has to be consulted. The candidate
has either to be his friend or to pretend to be his friend, before
he can succeed. A man running for the presidency could not say
the slightest word against the laboring man, or calculated to put
a stain upon industry, without destroying every possible chance of
success. Generally, every candidate tries to show that he is a
laboring man, or that he was a laboring man, or that his father
was before him. There is in this country very little of the spirit
of caste--the most infamous spirit that ever infested the heartless
breast of the brainless head of a human being.
_Question_. What will be the effect on labor of a departure in
American policy in the direction of free trade?
_Answer_. If free trade could be adopted to-morrow there would be
an instant shrinkage of values in this country. Probably the
immediate loss would equal twenty billion dollars--that is to say,
one-third of the value of the country. No one can tell its extent.
All thing are so interwoven that to destroy one industry cripples
another, and the influence keeps on until it touches the circumference
of human interests.
I believe that labor is a blessing. It never was and never will
be a curse. It is a blessed thing to labor for your wife and
children, for your father and mother, and for the ones you love.
It is a blessed thing to have an object in life--something to do--
something to call into play your best thoughts, to develop your
faculties and to make you a man. How beautiful, how charming, are
the dreams of the young mechanic, the artist, the musician, the
actor and the student. How perfectly stupid must be the life of
a young man with nothing to do, no ambition, no enthusiasm--that
is to say, nothing of the divine in him; the young man with an
object in life, of whose brain a great thought, a great dream has
taken possession, and in whose heart there is a great, throbbing
hope. He looks forward to success--to wife, children, home--all
the blessings and sacred joys of human life. He thinks of wealth
and fame and honor, and of a long, genial, golden, happy autumn.
Work gives the feeling of independence, of self-respect. A man
who does something necessarily puts a value on himself. He feels
that he is a part of the world's force. The idler--no matter what
he says, no matter how scornfully he may look at the laborer--in
his very heart knows exactly what he is; he knows that he is a
counterfeit, a poor worthless imitation of a man.
But there is a vast difference between work and what I call "toil."
What must be the life of a man who can earn only one dollar or two
dollars a day? If this man has a wife and a couple of children
how can the family live? What must they eat? What must they wear?
From the cradle to the coffin they are ignorant of any luxury of
life. If the man is sick, if one of the children dies, how can
doctors and medicines be paid for? How can the coffin or the grave
be purchased? These people live on what might be called "the snow
line"--just at that point where trees end and the mosses begin.
What are such lives worth? The wages of months would hardly pay
for the ordinary dinner of the family of a rich man. The savings
of a whole life would not purchase one fashionable dress, or the
lace on it. Such a man could not save enough during his whole life
to pay for the flowers of a fashionable funeral.
And yet how often hundreds of thousands of persons, who spend
thousands of dollars every year on luxuries, really wonder why the
laboring people should complain. They are astonished when a car
driver objects to working fourteen hours a day. Men give millions
of dollars to carry the gospel to the heathen, and leave their own
neighbors without bread; and these same people insist on closing
libraries and museums of art on Sunday, and yet Sunday is the only
day that these institutions can be visited by the poor.
They even want to stop the street cars so that these workers, these
men and women, cannot go to the parks or the fields on Sunday.
They want stages stopped on fashionable avenues so that the rich
may not be disturbed in their prayers and devotions.
The condition of the workingman, even in America, is bad enough.
If free trade will not reduce wages what will? If manufactured
articles become cheaper the skilled laborers of America must work
cheaper or stop producing the articles. Every one knows that most
of the value of a manufactured article comes from labor. Think of
the difference between the value of a pound of cotton and a pound
of the finest cotton cloth; between a pound of flax and enough
point lace to weigh a pound; between a few ounces of paint, two or
three yards of canvas and a great picture; between a block of stone
and a statue! Labor is the principal factor in price; when the
price falls wages must go down.
I do not claim that protection is for the benefit of any particular
class, but that it is for the benefit not only of that particular
class, but of the entire country. In England the common laborer
expects to spend his old age in some workhouse. He is cheered
through all his days of toil, through all his years of weariness,
by the prospect of dying a respectable pauper. The women work as
hard as the men. They toil in the iron mills. They make nails,
they dig coal, they toil in the fields.
In Europe they carry the hod, they work like beasts and with beasts,
until they lose almost the semblance of human beings--until they
look inferior to the animals they drive. On the labor of these
deformed mothers, of these bent and wrinkled girls, of little boys
with the faces of old age, the heartless nobility live in splendor
and extravagant idleness. I am not now speaking of the French
people, as France is the most prosperous country in Europe.
Let us protect our mothers, our wives and our children from the
deformity of toil, from the depths of poverty.
_Question_. Is not the ballot an assurance to the laboring man
that he can get fair treatment from his employer?
_Answer_. The laboring man in this country has the political power,
provided he has the intelligence to know it and the intelligence
to use it. In so far as laws can assist labor, the workingman has
it in his power to pass such laws; but in most foreign lands the
laboring man has really no voice. It is enough for him to work
and wait and suffer and emigrate. He can take refuge in the grave
or go to America.
In the old country, where people have been taught that all blessing
come from the king, it is very natural for the poor to believe the
other side of that proposition--that is to say, all evils come from
the king, from the government. They are rocked in the cradle of
this falsehood. So when they come to this country, if they are
unfortunate, it is natural for them to blame the Government.
The discussion of these questions, however, has already done great
good. The workingman is becoming more and more intelligent. He
is getting a better idea every day of the functions and powers and
limitations of government, and if the problem is ever worked out--
and by "problem" I mean the just and due relations that should
exist between labor and capital--it will be worked out here in
America.
_Question_. What assurance has the American laborer that he will
not be ultimately swamped by foreign immigration?
_Answer_. Most of the immigrants that come to American come because
they want a home. Nearly every one of them is what you may call
"land hungry." In his country, to own a piece of land was to be
respectable, almost a nobleman. The owner of a little land was
regarded as the founder of a family--what you might call a "village
dynasty." When they leave their native shores for America, their
dream is to become a land owner--to have fields, to own trees, and
to listen to the music of their own brooks.
The moment they arrive the mass of them seek the West, where land
can be obtained. The great Northwest now is being filled with
Scandinavian farmers, with persons from every part of Germany--in
fact from all foreign countries--and every year they are adding
millions of acres to the plowed fields of the Republic. This land
hunger, this desire to own a home, to have a field, to have flocks
and herds, to sit under your own vine and fig tree, will prevent
foreign immigration from interfering to any hurtful degree with
the skilled workmen of America. These land owners, these farmers,
become consumers of manufactured articles. They keep the wheels
and spindles turning and the fires in the forges burning.
_Question_. What do you think of Cleveland's message?
_Answer_. Only the other day I read a speech made by the Hon.
William D. Kelley, of Pennsylvania, upon this subject, in which he
says in answer to what he calls "the puerile absurdity of President
Cleveland's assumption" that the duty is always added to the cost,
not only of imported commodities, but to the price of like commodities
produced in this country, "that the duties imposed by our Government
on sugar reduced to _ad valorem_ were never so high as now, and
the price of sugar was never in this country so low as it is now."
He also showed that this tax on sugar has made it possible for us
to produce sugar from other plants and he gives the facts in relation
to corn sugar.
We are now using annually nineteen million bushels of corn for the
purpose of making glucose or corn sugar. He shows that in this
industry alone there has been a capital invested of eleven million
dollars; that seven hundred and thirty-two thousand acres of land
are required to furnish the supply, and that this one industry now
gives employment to about twenty-two thousand farmers, about five
thousand laborers in factories, and that the annual value of this
product of corn sugar is over seventeen million dollars.
He also shows what we may expect from the cultivation of the beet.
I advise every one to read that speech, so that they may have some
idea of the capabilities of this country, of the vast wealth asking
for development, of the countless avenues opened for ingenuity,
energy and intelligence.
_Question_. Does the protective tariff cheapen the prices of
commodities to the laboring man?
_Answer_. In this there are involved two questions. If the tariff
is so low that the foreign article is imported, of course this
tariff is added to the cost and must be paid by the consumer; but
if the protective tariff is so high that the importer cannot pay
it, and as a consequence the article is produced in America, then
it depends largely upon competition whether the full amount of the
tariff will be added to the article. As a rule, competition will
settle that question in America, and the article will be sold as
cheaply as the producers can afford.
For instance: If there is a tariff, we will say of fifty cents on
a pair of shoes, and this tariff is so low that the foreign article
can afford to pay it, then that tariff, of course, must be paid by
the consumer. But suppose the tariff was five dollars on a pair
of shoes--that is to say, absolutely prohibitory--does any man in
his senses say that five dollars would be added to each pair of
American shoes? Of course, the statement is the answer.
I think it is the duty of the laboring man in this country, first,
thoroughly to post himself upon these great questions, to endeavor
to understand his own interest as well as the interest of his
country, and if he does, I believe he will arrive at the conclusion
that it is far better to have the country filled with manufacturers
than to be employed simply in the raising of raw material. I think
he will come to the conclusion that we had better have skilled
labor here, and that it is better to pay for it than not to have
it. I think he will find that it is better for America to be
substantially independent of the rest of the world. I think he
will conclude that nothing is more desirable than the development
of American brain, and that nothing better can be raised than great
and splendid men and women. I think he will conclude that the
cloud coming from the factories, from the great stacks and chimneys,
is the cloud on which will be seen, and always seen, the bow of
American promise.
_Question_. What have you to say about tariff reform?
_Answer_. I have this to say: That the tariff is for the most
part the result of compromises--that is, one State wishing to have
something protected agrees to protect something else in some other
State, so that, as a matter of fact, many things are protected that
need no protection, and many things are unprotected that ought to
be cared for by the Government.
I am in favor of a sensible reform of the tariff--that is to say,
I do not wish to put it in the power of the few to practice extortion
upon the many. Congress should always be wide awake, and whenever
there is any abuse it should be corrected. At the same time, next
to having the tariff just--next in importance is to have it stable.
It does us great injury to have every dollar invested in manufactures
frightened every time Congress meets. Capital should feel secure.
Insecurity calls for a higher interest, wants to make up for the
additional risk, whereas, when a dollar feels absolutely certain
that it is well invested, that it is not to be disturbed, it is
satisfied with a very low rate of interest.
The present agitation--the message of President Cleveland upon
these questions--will cost the country many hundred millions of
dollars.
_Question_. I see that some one has been charging that Judge
Gresham is an Infidel?
_Answer_. I have known Judge Gresham for many years, and of course
have heard him talk upon many subjects, but I do not remember ever
discussing with him a religious topic. I only know that he believes
in allowing every man to express his opinions, and that he does
not hate a man because he differs with him. I believe that he
believes in intellectual hospitality, and that he would give all
churches equal rights, and would treat them all with the utmost
fairness. I regard him as a fair-minded, intelligent and honest
man, and that is enough for me. I am satisfied with the way he
acts, and care nothing about his particular creed. I like a manly
man, whether he agrees with me or not. I believe that President
Garfield was a minister of the Church of the Disciples--that made
no difference to me. Mr. Blaine is a member of some church in
Augusta--I care nothing for that. Whether Judge Gresham belongs
to any church, I do not know. I never asked him, but I know he
does not agree with me by a large majority.
In this country, where a divorce has been granted between church
and state, the religious opinions of candidates should be let alone.
To make the inquiry is a piece of impertinence--a piece of impudence.
I have voted for men of all persuasions and expect to keep right
on, and if they are not civilized enough to give me the liberty
they ask for themselves, why I shall simply set them an example of
decency.
_Question_. What do you think of the political outlook?
_Answer_. The people of this country have a great deal of
intelligence. Tariff and free trade and protection and home
manufactures and American industries--all these things will be
discussed in every schoolhouse of the country, and in thousands
and thousands of political meetings, and when next November comes
you will see the Democratic party overthrown and swept out of power
by a cyclone. All other questions will be lost sight of. Even
the Prohibitionists would rather drink beer in a prosperous country
than burst with cold water and hard times.
The preservation of what we have will be the great question. This
is the richest country and the most prosperous country, and I
believe that the people have sense enough to continue the policy
that has given them those results. I never want to see the
civilization of the Old World, or rather the barbarism of the Old
World, gain a footing on this continent. I am an American. I
believe in American ideas--that is to say, in equal rights, and in
the education and civilization of all the people.
--_New York Press_, June 3, 1888.