qualities and his capacity for development?
--A. There are individual instances I know of where negroes
have received and taken a good education. As a class, it
would probably be several generations, at any rate, before
they would be able to compete with the Caucasian. I believe
that the negro is capable of receiving an ordinary English
education, and there are instances where they enter
professions and become good lawyers. For instance, I know in
the town of Greenville, Miss., right across the river from
me, a negro attorney, who is a very intelligent man, and I
heard one of the leading attorneys in Greenville say he
would almost have anybody on the opposite side of a case
rather than he would that negro. The sheriff of my county is
from Ohio, and a negro, he is a man whom we all support in
his office. We are anxious that the negroes should have a
fair representation. For instance, you ask for the feeling
existing between the proprietor and the negroes. The probate
judge of my county is a negro and one of my tenants, and I
am here now in New York attending to important business for
my county as an appointee of that man. He has upon him the
responsibilities of all estates in the county; he is probate
judge.
Q. Is he a capable man?
--A. A very capable man, and an excellent, good man, and a
very just one.
Q. Do you see any reason why, with fair opportunities
assured to himself and to his children, he may not become a
useful and competent, American citizen?
--A. We already consider him so.
Q. The question is settled?
--A. I thought you were speaking personally of the man I
referred to.
Q. No; I was speaking of the negro generally--the negro
race.
--A. Let me understand your question exactly.
Q. Do you see any reason why the negroes, as a component
part of the American population, may not, with a fair
chance, come to be useful, industrious, and competent to the
discharge of the duties of citizenship?
--A. I think they may as a class, but it will take probably
generations for them to arrive at that standard.
Q. It has taken us generations to arrive at the standard,
has it not?
--A. Yes, sir.
Q. There is some talk about our ancestors having been
pirates, I believe. Now, will you state to us what the
existing facilities for education are among the negroes?
--A. I can only speak as regards Arkansas. Of course I do
not know much of the other States. In Arkansas we have in
each county a school board. These boards examine and employ
teachers. We are taxed for a school fund, from which these
teachers are paid.
Q. What proportion of the colored children attend school,
do you think?
--A. On my own property there are five schools, and I think
the larger portion, I might say nearly all that are capable
of going to school, do go to school.
Q. How many children are there on your own property?
--A. I could scarcely form an idea.
Q. There are five schools?
--A. There are five schools, and I should suppose from 300
to 500 children.
Q. Those are educated in public schools?
--A. Yes, sir.
Q. I understand you to say that nearly all of them attend?
--A. Yes, sir.
Q. For how long a time each year is school kept open?
--A. The schools extend all the year except vacation, I
think, which is about three months; but a number of the
negroes will withdraw their children from school during
cotton-picking season, to help them pick the crop.
Q. Between what ages do they actually attend school?
--A. From 6 to 19. I know a great many of them who are going
to school who are 17, 18, and 19, who can just begin to read
and write a little.
Q. Do you find any inclination among the older negroes who
are past school age to endeavor to read and write?
--A. Not very much, but they are anxious their children
should, and appeal to them. In almost every instance where a
man has a child who can read and write, he will bring him
along with him when he makes a contract. They are very proud
of their children being able to read and write.
Q. Are they satisfied, as a rule, with their simply
becoming able to read and write, or do they like to have
them make a little further progress in mathematics,
geography, &c.?
--A. As a class they look to them simply to read and write.
They think when they have got that far they know everything;
but then there are certain ones who have ambition, just as
it is with our own race. There are some men who have tastes
for literature, and receive a better education than others
do, but it is not the same proportion of the negro race of
course that it is with our own. There are instances where
negroes are also anxious to obtain a collegiate education,
and become school teachers.
Q. I do not know that you are able to state to what extent
they actually attend school in the hill districts?
--A. I am not.
Q. You speak both of your own plantation and of other
plantations as well as your own in that regard?
--A. I am speaking of the alluvial lands along the
Mississippi River.
Q. In Arkansas?
--A. Not only in Arkansas, but in Louisiana and Mississippi;
I will say the alluvial lands on the Mississippi River
between Memphis and Vicksburg.
Q. Are the negroes on those lands generally having the same
opportunities for education that they do on your plantation?
--A. Oh, yes, sir; there is a common school system.
Q. And it is as prevalent in Louisiana and Mississippi as
in Arkansas?
--A. I think it is.
Q. What is the nativity of those teachers, as a rule?
--A. They are generally colored people from either the East
or the Northwest. There are some white teachers, but very
few.
Q. Are any of the white teachers Southern in birth?
--A. There is not a white teacher on my own property; they
are all colored teachers on my own property. The proportion
of white teachers is very small.
Q. How much do these colored teachers themselves know?
--A. Some of them are remarkably well educated.
Q. And generally earnestly devoted to their work?
--A. Perfectly so.
Q. Or is it simply to get their money?
--A. No; I think some of them really have a desire to see
their scholars advance.
Q. Some pride in their race, to have them get on, I
suppose?
--A. I think there is a certain pride in that respect; and,
again, they want to gain a reputation as teachers.
Q. What compensation does a teacher get?
--A. I think about from $50 to $100 a month.
Q. Do they pay their own expenses, board and shelter?
--A. Yes, sir; but board is cheap, merely nominal.
Q. About what amount?
--A. I should say these teachers can get board for $10 a
month.
Q. Is the cost of clothing in your part of the country
about the same as here?
--A. This is our market.
Q. You buy the ready-made clothing largely for the
population in general, I suppose?
--A. We buy both ready-made clothing and cloth to make up.
Q. I suppose the colored population hardly buy custom
goods?
--A. A great many of them buy the cloth, and some of their
women are as good tailoresses as you would find anywhere.
They buy the cloth and make it up themselves.
Q. That must bring a suit of clothes pretty cheap in a
colored family; they really expend nothing but buy the cloth
themselves?
--A. They sell very good jeans cloth there at 35 or 40 cents
a yard; they generally wear jeans.
Q. All seasons of the year?
--A. Generally in all seasons of the year. In the summer
time a laboring man hardly ever wears a coat at all.
Q. What do you think an average colored Southern laborer
expends per annum for his clothing, say the head of the
family, the man--what does it cost him for clothing a year?
--A. I cannot give you a definite answer. I will only say
that we who are the producers of cotton are very glad to see
them get in a prosperous condition in order that there may
be more consumption, and when a man is prosperous he will
buy two suits of clothes, where if he is not prosperous he
will make one do.
Q. We have had a good deal of testimony as to what it
actually costs a Northern laborer a year for clothing. I
have no desire to show that any laborers dress cheaply or
poorly; I merely want to get an idea of the relative cost of
the laboring man living North or South, in the item of
clothing?
--A. I can sell and do sell a man a pair of jeans pants and
a coat from $7 to $12 per suit.
Q. How many suits will he want in a year?
--A. That will depend on his condition and his ability to
pay me. If he is a prosperous man and beginning to
accumulate he will make one do. Whenever a negro begins to
accumulate he goes to extremes; he does not want to buy
anything; he wants to accumulate rapidly. Where a man is not
doing so well, and there is little doubt of his ability to
pay, he would probably want several suits; but I would
confine him to one or two.
Q. The same is true, I suppose, of his wife and children?
--A. Yes, sir.
Q. But you look on the matter of clothing as a much less
expensive item in the laborer's account in your country than
here in the North where the climate is colder, I suppose?
--A. Yes, sir. What absorbs the profit of the laborers with
us is their want of providence; that is, if they get surplus
money they throw it away for useless articles.
Q. It has been suggested that a postal savings bank might
be a good thing as a place of deposit of the savings of the
colored population of the South; they might feel some
confidence in an institution of that kind, and that it would
be a beneficial thing to them. What is your own judgment?
--A. I advocate it and approve it, and indeed propose to
start a savings bank in our own neighborhood. In this
connection I will mention another important feature. In the
Mississippi Valley--and when I speak of the Mississippi
Valley I mean both sides of the river, Arkansas and
Louisiana on one side and Mississippi on the other--there
are numbers of negroes who have considerable accumulations
and use their surplus to advance to other negroes. For
instance, there are negroes right on our property who have
accumulated enough to help out certain others, as they
express it, and they use their money as an investment in
that way. For instance one negro who has got something will
advance it to another negro and take a mortgage on his crop.
Consequently there are numbers of them who are getting
advances from their co-laborers, and I always give them that
opportunity when they want it. My idea of the adjustment in
the Mississippi Valley, seeing what I can make from the
mercantile portion of my business, is that it is simply my
revenue that I get from the rent of my land as an investment
on my capital; and whenever a negro can get his own merchant
in New Orleans--a number of them have very good factors in
New Orleans and ship their cotton direct--I encourage it.
When one negro wants to help out another, I give him the
privilege of doing it and encourage it. There are several
negroes, a great many, not a few in Chicot County to-day who
have their own factors in New Orleans, ship their own goods,
and receive their own accounts of sales.
Q. They are not owners of alluvial lands?
--A. They are not owners at all; they are tenants.
Q. I suppose some time they will be liable to make some
accumulations, and they will now and then own a plantation?
--A. I do know of one instance on the river below Vicksburg
where the old property of Mr. Davis was bought by a former
slave of his.
Q. Is that the only instance?
--A. The only instance I know of.
Q. One question we have been accustomed to put is as to the
actual personal feeling that exists between the laborers and
capitalists of different parts of the country. What is the
feeling between the laborers, colored and white, and the
owners of the land and of capital at the South?
--A. I confine my replies to my own section, because I am
not familiar with the others. I have answered that question
in the written answers. The feeling is harmonious and good,
as I have expressed it there. The negro naturally looks to
the planter for advice and for assistance, and the planter
looks to his laborers for the development of his property.
Consequently their interests are identical and their
feelings good.
Q. You have alluded once or twice to the pressure of
outside, and I suppose Northern, opinion; I assume that you
mean political opinion in the past and the desirability that
it should cease. What is the fact as to a progressive
disintegration of the solid Republican or solid negro vote
of the South? What are the chances of its dividing, and of
the white vote dividing? We hear now of a "solid South,"
colored on the one side and white on the other. What
prospect is there of a division in that regard; to what
extent does it exist, or is it going on?
--A. The negroes of the South are already divided in their
votes. There are a great many who vote with the proprietors
of the properties. There are instances where they vote with
what they call their Republican friends. A few years ago in
the South any man who was an escaped convict from one of
your penitentiaries here who would come down to that country
and tell the negroes that he was one of General Grant's
soldiers, and fought to free him, would vote the last one
out; but any of those negroes would come to me at that very
time with his money and get me to save it for him, and take
care of it for him. He would put all his confidence in me so
far as his money was concerned, but when it would come to
politics he would vote with this man, who probably did not
own the coat he had on his back. Those kind of inferences
were what did do us in the South very material damage. Let
me illustrate that by a riot in my own county. In Chicot
County, in 1872, there was a proposition to impose upon the
county a railroad tax of $250,000 for the purpose of
building a railroad.
Q. What proportion of the taxable property of the county
would that have been?
--A. Our whole assessed valuation was about $1,500,000 at
that time. This was brought out by a promise that if the
appropriation was made, the levees on our river should be
built and this road would run on the levees. At that time
the whole of the local government in Chicot County was in
the hands of men who did not own any property in the county,
and had just come down there and been elected by the
negroes, who have a very large majority in that county. This
tax was a very great imposition upon us. At that time there
was a negro attorney at Lake Village, who was one of the
prime movers in this thing. The planters knew that this was
only intended as a speculation upon the county, for the vote
was afterwards taken, the appropriation was made, and not
one foot of levee was put up, and not one foot of that
railroad was built in Chicot County. Still we are mandamused
now for the interest on that debt that was put on us by that
kind of influence. One of our planters was remonstrating
with this negro attorney about this debt and told him it was
an imposition on the property owners, and that the thing
ought not to be done, when the man became violent and
insolent, and it resulted in a difficulty between this
planter and the negro. The planter had a little pen-knife in
his pocket, the blade not longer than my little finger; he
struck the negro with it and it happened accidentally to hit
him on a vital point and killed him. The sheriff of the
county was a negro. The planter, with two innocent parties
in whose house this occurrence took place at the
county-seat, in Lake Village, was arrested and lodged in
jail. A few days afterwards--probably not more than two or
three--nearly every negro in the county was summoned to
Lake Village, and they rose like so many locusts, coming in
from every direction, took those three men out of jail shot
them to pieces, murdered them. It was such an outrage that
the people from Memphis and Vicksburg and from the hill
countries, commenced to come in there with companies,
started down with companies. On investigation we found out
that the sheriff of the county had exercised his authority
to send out to the ignorant negroes of the county and summon
them to the village, and these fellows went because they
were afraid not to obey the mandate of the sheriff. At that
time feeling was running very high, and these people were
anxious to come in and quell this riot, but a few of us who
were more prudent, a few of the leading planters of the
county, got together, sent these different companies word
not to come there, that we did not want them in the county;
some of the companies were already on their way to Chicot
County, thinking the people there were going to be
massacred. A great many of our people had to run away from
their homes for several days; but we took the ground that we
would let the thing take its natural course. As soon as
things quieted down, which they did so partially in three or
four days, some of our gentlemen who had gone off with their
families returned, and it resulted in our arresting a few of
the ringleaders in the county. The courts and the
administration were all at that time in the hands of persons
not identified with the interests of the county, and it was
impossible for us to get justice meted out. We saved a
massacre of the negroes of the county, but we never could
bring those men to any kind of punishment before the courts,
and finally we came to a compromise with them, that if they
would leave the county we would withdraw the suit against
them, and that was the way the thing was ended. Now, I do
not believe you could get up a riot in Chicot County because
I think there are many intelligent negroes there who would
not permit it. Those are the kind of race issues that I
referred to. Relieve us of that sort of thing, and leave our
government to ourselves and our people, and give to the
negro the same protection the white man has, but do not give
him any more. Do not let him feel that he has the United
States Government standing behind him, and that he is the
child of the United States Government to be taken care of,
but that he must rely on his own resources and energy for
his living, and time will solve the question, and the demand
for his labor will protect him.
Q. Do you find that the feeling among the negroes which
resulted in the exodus of a few years ago has been allayed
and perhaps has disappeared?
--A. I will tell you something that is rather amusing about
that. The first that I heard of a negro exodus in my section
of the country--it was to Kansas--was my manager coming into
my room one morning and saying that the negroes were going
out to the river to go to Kansas. I said, "It is several
miles to the river; how are they going?" Said he, "They are
toting their things out on their heads." Said I, "Go right
at once there and offer them the wagons on the plantation to
haul the things. What is the matter?" Said he, "I don't
know; I went out this morning and summoned the hands to the
field, but they say they are all going to Kansas." I got on
my horse and rode out and met a negro who had been my
engineer. I said to him, "What is the matter, where are you
all going?" He stopped right on the road and said, "Mr.
Calhoun, you never have deceived me, and I am going to tell
you what is the matter. There were two men came through here
last week, one night, and said 'You see this picture?' There
is a picture of a farm in Kansas for me that General Grant
has bought out there for me. That is so because my name is
on the back of it, and here is my ticket; that carries me to
Kansas." Said I, "Let me see it." He showed me a piece of
pasteboard that had printed on it "Good for one trip to
Kansas." Said I, "What did you pay him for this?" He said,
"We paid him $2 a piece." "How many of you are in this
thing?" "Over eighty of us are in this thing." Said I, "That
man then swindled you out of $160; he is an imposter; there
is no farm bought for you in Kansas." I saw that the time
for me to remonstrate with them was not then; they were on
their way to the Mississippi River, and I let them all go.
After they got out there I went and expostulated with them;
told them of the difference in climate, soil, and everything
else that they were accustomed to, and that if they went
there many of them would lose their families and children.
They would not listen to me. They went on to the river bank,
and those negroes who went out there owed me over $109,000.
Q. How many of them were there? Eighty I think you said?
--A. There were 80, I think. Once, I suppose, there were 150
negroes, perhaps more, on the bank of the river. They were
not at a regular landing. They went out to the intermediate
points where a boat would not be compelled to land. We
notified all the boats coming up the river not to land at
this point. I did not want these negroes to go off, being
satisfied that they were going to their ruin if they did;
that they were leaving comfortable homes; many of them had
sold their mules or given them away at a mere sacrifice. One
negro sold a mule worth $150 for $15 to get off. They opened
their potato-houses, they opened their corn-cribs and
scattered the corn, giving it away to everybody that would
offer them five cents a bushel. I had given two of these
people a piece of land, the productions of all of which
they were to have for bringing it into cultivation and
improving it. Knowing the negro nature as I do, and knowing
that he would not want anybody to derive the benefit of
something that he thought he was entitled to, I got two
white men in the county to come and offer me to take this
piece of land and cultivate it on shares with me, giving me
one half its product, whereas with them I was entitled to
nothing. As soon as those two fellows found out that I had
made a good bargain for their land they went back home from
the river bank, and as soon as they went back all the rest
followed. Then I called the whole plantation up and told
them to appoint two representatives and that I would send
them to Kansas at my own expense to examine into this matter
and report to them. These two men went to Kansas, came back,
and reported the true condition of affairs; and now if what
they call in that country "a poor white man"--the negro's
expression--goes through the country and says "Kansas," they
almost want to mob him. That was the result of the Kansas
movement.
Q. What has become of those who went to Kansas?
--A. Many of them have returned and many have died; numbers
of them have died. Quite a large number went to Washington
County Mississippi, just opposite me.
Q. From time to time, at Washington, efforts are being made
to secure public lands in the Territories, the Indian
Territory and elsewhere, for the purpose of colonizing such
tracts with negroes. Do you think there is any sort of
occasion for that?
--A. None in the world. If the alluvial lands on the
Mississippi River were protected from overflow and brought
into a condition where they could be cultivated they would
afford all the homes, and of the best character, that the
negroes could possibly want in the South, and the natural
tendency is to come to just such lands.
Q. And the negroes prefer to be there to anywhere else?
--A. Those that come, I notice, never go back.
Q. You suggested the improvement of the levees. What is the
necessity, and in what degree is it difficult for those
residing along the river banks to protect themselves?
--A. I am the president of the levee board of Chicot County.
The plan which has been suggested by the Mississippi River
Commission and Mr. Eads, as their chief engineer, is
unquestionably the correct one for the improvement of the
Mississippi River. We know this not only from theory, but
from long experience with the river, those of us who have
lived there. The Mississippi River being, as it is generally
termed, the "Father of Waters," and passing through several
States, it is almost a national system, and it would be
impossible for any system to be adopted by the States which
would be local. Consequently it is imperatively the duty of
the Government of the United States to take care of the
improvement of the Mississippi River. There are certain
sections of the Mississippi River that are naturally above
overflow, made so by cut-offs. The fall of the Mississippi
River is about four inches to the mile. Consequently, when
there is one of those large bends, where the river runs
around where the cut-off is, no increase of water is needed.
The fall being four inches to the mile, the lands just above
the cut-off are made higher and above overflow, whereas just
below, the lands are overflowed or become liable to
overflow. The improvement of the Mississippi River itself
for commercial purposes, as well as the protection of the
lands, is dependent upon the building of the levees, for the
levees of course confine the water within its banks, and
give not only a greater volumn of water, but greater
velocity for scouring purposes, which scours out the sand
bars that are formed continually on the river. Captain
Eads's plan of forming jetties where the banks cave, saves
this deposit, as it were, in the water, which makes the sand
bars. A mattress is put against the caving banks which
prevents the alluvial land caving into the river which forms
the sand bars below. Then the increased volumn and increased
velocity of the water wash out the channel, and improve it
for commercial purposes, answering the object of protecting
the land, and at the same time opening that immense channel
for commerce.
Again, there are very important lines of railroad that are
being built up and down either bank of the Mississippi
River, and it is necessary they should be protected for
commercial purposes, as well as that the Mississippi River
should be improved for commercial purposes, and they can
only be protected by the building of levees. We who have
been on the river, and who feel that we are familiar with
it, have closely watched the course of the Commission, and I
can only say, as an expression of the opinion of the people,
that we indorse what the Commission are doing.
Q. And desire still more of it?
--A. Yes, sir; it is absolutely necessary. What has already
been expended by the Government would be absolutely useless
unless additional appropriations are made to complete the
work. I would like to call your attention to this point. The
Atchafalaya, in Louisiana, is a stream which runs from just
about the mouth of Red River into the Gulf of Mexico. The
fall from the mouth of the Atchafalaya and Red River to the
Gulf of Mexico is very much greater than the fall from the
mouth of Red River to the Gulf by way of New Orleans down
the Mississippi River. A few years ago the Atchafalaya was a
stream which could be waded across, but owing to the current
gradually going through it, it commenced to wash out until
now it has got to be a stream 100 feet deep.
Q. Is there or not any perceptible increase or diminution
of the column of the Mississippi itself as compared with 25,
or 50, or 100 years ago?
--A. We think that our waters are higher now than they have
ever been before.
Q. Greater extremes, or is there a uniform flow?
--A. A larger uniform flow, and it is attributed to the
destruction of the forests, though that is mere theory. One
of the arguments, at any rate, is that it is owing to the
destruction of the forests in the Northwest, which causes
more rain storms and gives a larger rainfall.
Q. I have heard the idea advanced that the destruction of
the woods and timber about the headwaters would, in case of
rain, lead to a more rapid deposit in the stream, it would
not be held back by the swampy nature of the soil, and so
you might have more sudden rises and falls in the river than
formerly without the volume of water or the uniform flow
being increased or lessened?
--A. I think--at least I have heard it so expressed by men
experienced on the river--that the flow of the Mississippi
River is greater now than it was formerly.
Q. That one year with another, more water runs down the
channel?
--A. We can see a slight increase of the water of the
Mississippi River. I do not know how it may increase in the
future, or if it will at all, but that is the opinion of
people there now. The point I want to call your attention to
specifically is the necessity for the prevention of the
water of the Red River going down through the Atchafalaya,
for if the Atchafalaya washes out it leaves New Orleans, a
large commercial city, upon, as it were, an inland sea. The
waters which overflow from the banks of the Mississippi
River on the front of Arkansas go over into the Red River
and never come back into the Mississippi River any more
until they come out at the mouth of the Red River. Just at
the mouth of Red River, and before Red River reaches the
Mississippi, is the Atchafalaya. So that all of this
overflow water that could be kept in the Mississippi River
by building the levees on the front of Arkansas, now goes
into Red River and helps to wash out the Atchafalaya, which
will ruin the city of New Orleans if that is not prevented.
It is a very strong commercial point, for the commerce of
New Orleans is a matter to be considered in our affairs.
Q. I suppose there is no doubt that the Atchafalaya
furnishes an outlet, which relieves your plantations very
much?
--A. No, sir; it does not affect where I live at all.
Q. Below the Red River, in Louisiana, is it not a relief in
case of an overflow?
--A. A partial relief; but in Louisiana, when you get down
that far, they pretty much have their system of levees
built, which protect the sugar district; there are only
probably a few gaps; and the Mississippi River, when it gets
that far down, does not rise in the same proportion that it
does where I live, 500 miles above. The mouth of the
Atchafalaya is 500 miles below where I am.
Q. Has this increased drainage from the Atchafalaya
resulted in any injury to the navigation of the river as far
north?
--A. Not as yet; but if it is not stopped--the commission
realize the fact I am now telling you--if it is not checked,
the whole Mississippi River will naturally turn through the
Atchafalaya, because the fall is so much greater.
Q. How do they propose to check it?
--A. That is a matter the commission and scientific
engineers would have to decide.
Q. Can they block it at the outlet of the Red River?
--A. They propose to check it principally by stopping the
water from the Mississippi River that goes into the Red
River. There would in that way be an enormous quantity of
water kept out of Red River. That would be one method. What
the engineers would consider sufficient or necessary to be
done, of course I would not venture to express an opinion
upon.
Q. What danger is there to the large mass of capital
invested in these alluvial lands, unless something is done
to prevent the overflows of which you speak?
--A. The lands that are now liable to overflow are almost
entirely abandoned.
Q. To how large an extent are they now abandoned?
--A. Taking in the whole of Mississippi Valley proper, from
Memphis down.
Q. Has there been any computation or reasonable estimate
that you know of the value of those lands affected by the
overflow?
--A. I have never heard of it; but I will say that those
lands which are liable to overflow now, if brought into
cultivation, are just as valuable as any we are cultivating;
probably more so, because they have the alluvial deposits
upon them. There is a deposit there from 3 to 4 inches.
Q. You have no idea of the extent of those lands?
--A. I cannot give you the proportion. I will simply say it
is a very large proportion.
Q. A third, or a half, or a quarter?
--A. More than a half. I saw it estimated some time ago, at
least I will give it as a statement published in the
_Planters' Journal_, published in Vicksburgh, that there are
thirteen counties on the Mississippi River which, if all
cleared up and put into cultivation, are capable of
producing the entire cotton crop of the United States, and I
have heard the question discussed.
Q. What prevents their being cleared up and put into
cultivation?
--A. Simply the overflow.
Q. Have they ever been cleared as yet?
--A. A great portion of them; and now destroyed because the
levee system is not complete. On these lands all the negro
labor which is not found profitable on the poorer lands in
the older States, could be made extremely profitable, not
only to the proprietors of the lands, but to the laborers
themselves.
Q. Do you think it would be within limit to say that one
half of the alluvial plantation lands, such as you have
described in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, is now
practically destroyed by reason of this overflow occasioned
by the destruction of the levee system?
--A. Yes, sir.
Q. At least one half?
--A. At least one half of that which has been in
cultivation, and which can be brought into cultivation.
Q. Of that which is thus useless now, what portion has been
formerly under cultivation?
--A. It would be impossible for any one to form an estimate,
because it is so varied.
Q. The amount of land that has been improved and which is
now destroyed by reason of the overflow, you cannot state?
--A. I cannot state it accurately; I will state it
approximately; I should say at least one third.
Q. One third of the entire amount that has been improved is
now destroyed by reason of the overflow, resulting from
imperfections in the levee system?
--A. Yes, sir; that is what I mean to say.
Q. And of that which has not been improved but might be
improved, how much?
--A. At least half.
* * * * *
As I have devoted some space to the general condition of labor in the
whole country, and as some of my statements and conclusions may be
looked upon as extravagant, I deem it very pertinent to add to the
appendix a portion of the testimony of Dr. R. Heber Newton, given
before Senator Blair's Committee on the "_Relations between Capital
and Labor_," in New York City, September 18, 1883 (Vol. II., p. 535).
Dr. Newton is recognized as a clear thinker and a ready writer not
only on theological but on economic questions as well. His testimony
on the points to which I have asked attention was as follows:
A LABOR QUESTION COMING
The broad fact that the United States census of 1870
estimated the average annual income of our wage-workers at a
little over $400 per capita, and that the census of 1880
estimates it at a little over $300 per capita, is the quite
sufficient evidence that there is a labor question coming
upon us in this country. The average wages of 1870
indicated, after due allowance for the inclusion of women
and children, a mass of miserably paid labor--that is, of
impoverished and degraded labor. The average wages of 1880
indicated that this mass of semi-pauperized labor is rapidly
increasing, and that its condition has become 25 per cent
worse in ten years. The shadow of the old-world
_proletariat_ is thus seen to be stealing upon our shores.
It is for specialists in political economy to study this
problem in the light of the large social forces that are
working such an alarming change in our American society. In
the consensus of their ripened judgment we must look for the
authoritative solution of this problem. I am not here to
assume that role. I have no pet hobby to propose, warranted
to solve the whole problem without failure. I do not believe
there is any such specific yet out. * * *
I
THE FAULTS OF LABOR
Plainly, labor's fault must be found with itself.
1. Leaving upon one side the class of skilled labor, a
large proportion of our wage-workers are notoriously
inefficient. In the most common tasks one has to watch the
average workingman in order to prevent his bungling a job.
Hands are worth little without some brains; as in the work
done, so in the pay won. Our labor is quite as largely
uninterested--having no more heart than brains back of the
hands. Work is done mechanically by most workingmen, with
little pride in doing it well, and little ambition to be
continually doing it better.
2. There is too commonly as little sense of identity with
the employer's interests, or of concern that any equivalent
in work should be rendered for the pay received. In forms
irritating beyond expression employers are made to feel that
their employees do not in the least mind wasting their
material, injuring their property, and blocking their
business in the most critical moments. Under what possible
system, save in a grievous dearth of laborers, can such
labor be well off, and incompetence and indifference draw
high wages?
3. Our labor is for the most part very thriftless. In the
purchase and in the preparation of food--the chief item of
expense in the workingman's family and that wherein economic
habits count for most--men and women are alike improvident.
The art of making money go the farthest in food is
comparatively unknown. Workingmen will turn up their noses
at the fare on which a Carlyle did some of the finest
literary work of our century. I remember some time ago
speaking to one of our butchers, who told me that workingmen
largely ordered some of his best cuts. Now an ample supply
of nutritious food is certainly essential for good work,
whether of the brain or of the brawn. The advance of labor
is rightly gauged, among other ways, by its increasing
consumption of wheat and meat, but the nutritiousness of
meat is not necessarily dependent upon its being from the
finest cut. I should like to see all men eating "French"
chops and porter-house steaks if they could afford it; but
when I know the average wages of our workingmen and the cost
of living on the simplest possible scale, it is discouraging
to learn such a fact as that which I have mentioned, since
all the elements of necessary sustenance can be had in so
much cheaper forms. * * *
4. Labor must fault itself further, on the ground of its
lack of power of combination and of its defective methods in
combination. It has been by combination that the middle
class has arisen, and by it that capital has so wonderfully
increased. The story of the Middle Ages, familiar to us all,
is the story of the rise of the industrial class by
combination in guilds. Labor's numbers, now a hindrance,
might thus become a help. In a mob men trample upon each
other; in an army they brace each other to the charge of
victory.
Trades-unions represent the one effective form of
combination won by American labor. Trades-unions need no
timid apologists. Their vindication is in the historic tale
of the successful advances which they have won for
workingmen. Called into being to defend labor against
legislation in the interests of capital, in the days when to
ask for an advance in wages led to workingmen's being thrown
into prison, they have in England led on to the brilliant
series of reforms which mark our century, as told so well in
the articles by Mr. Howell (_The Nineteenth Century_ for
October, 1882) and by Mr. Harrison (_The Contemporary
Review_ for October, 1883). Doubtless they have committed
plenty of follies, and are still capable of stupid tyrannies
that only succeed in handicapping labor, in alienating
capital, and in checking productivity--that is, in lessening
the sum total of divisible wealth. Such actions are
inevitable in the early stages of combination on the part of
uneducated men, feeling a new sense of power, and striking
blindly out in angry retaliation for real or fancied
injuries.
Trades-unions are gradually, however, outgrowing their
crude methods. The attempts, such as we have seen lately,
of great corporations to break them up, is a piece of
despotism which ought to receive an indignant rebuke from
the people at large. Labor must combine, just as capital has
combined, in forming these very corporations. Labor's only
way of defending its interests as a class is through
combination. It is the abuse and not the use of
trades-unions against which resistance should be made.
The chief abuse of our trades-unions has been their
concentration of attention upon the organization of strikes.
Strikes seem to me in our present stage of the
"free-contract" system entirely justifiable when they are
really necessary. Workingmen have the right to combine in
affixing a price at which they wish to work. The supply of
labor and the demand for goods, in the absence of higher
considerations, will settle the question as to whether they
can get the increase. The trying features of this method of
reaching a result are incidental to our immature industrial
system. Strikes have had their part to play in the
development of that system. We note their failures and
forget their successes; but they have had their signal
success, and have won substantial advantages for labor.
Their chief service, however, has been in teaching
combination, and in showing labor the need of a better
weapon by which to act than the strike itself.
The strike requires long practice and great skill to wield
it well. Practice in it is more costly than the experiments
at Woolwich. Mr. Dolles, in his new work on political
economy, gives some statistics which abundantly illustrate
the folly of strikes, although he only gives one side of the
case, namely, the losses which fall directly upon the
laborers themselves. If to these were added the losses of
capitalists, the aggregate would become colossal. In 1829
the Manchester spinners struck, and lost $1,250,000 in wages
before the dispute was at an end. The next year their
brethren at Ashton and Stayleybridge followed their example
in striking and in losing $1,250,000. In 1833 the builders
of Manchester forfeited $360,000 by voluntary idleness. In
1836 the spinners of Preston threw away $286,000. Eighteen
years afterward their successor, seventeen thousand strong,
slowly starved through thirty-six weeks and paid $1,200,000
for the privilege. In 1853 the English iron-workers lost
$12,000 by a strike. Such losses marked, too, the strikes of
the London builders in 1860, and tailors in 1868, and the
northern iron-workers in 1865. The strike of the Belfast
linen-weavers, which was ended a few weeks since by the
mediation of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science, cost the operatives $1,000,000.
The cost of strikes is expressible only in the aggregate of
the savings of labor consumed in idleness, of the loss to
the productivity of the country, of the disturbance of the
whole mechanism of exchange, and of the injury wrought upon
the delicate social organization by the strain thus placed
upon it. The famous Pittsburgh strike is estimated to have
cost the country ten millions of dollars. When so costly a
weapon is found to miss far more often than it hits, it is
altogether too dear. * * *
Trades-unions in this country seem to me to be gravely at
fault in clinging to such an obsolete weapon. They should
have turned their attention to our modern improvement upon
this bludgeon.
Arbitration is a far cheaper and more effective instrument
of adjusting differences between capital and labor--a far
more likely means of securing a fair increase of wages. It
places both sides to the controversy in an amicable mood,
and is an appeal to the reason and conscience--not wholly
dead in the most soulless corporation. It costs next to
nothing. It is already becoming a substitute for strikes in
England, where the trades-unions are adopting this new
weapon. * * *
Trades-unions ought, among us, to emulate the wisdom of
European workingmen, and use their mechanism to organize
forms of association which should look not alone to winning
higher wages but to making the most of existing wages, and
ultimately to leading the wage-system into a higher
development. The provident features of the English
trades-unions are commonly overlooked, and yet it is
precisely in these provident features that their main
development has been reached. Mr. George Howell shows that a
number of societies, which he had specially studied, had
spent in thirty years upward of $19,000,000 through their
various relief-funds, and $1,369,455 only on strikes. Mr.
Harrison speaks of seven societies spending in one year
(1879) upward of $4,000,000 upon their members out of work.
He shows that seven of the great societies spent in 1882
less than 2 per cent of their income on strikes; and states
that 99 per cent of union funds in England "have been
expended in the beneficent work of supporting workmen in bad
times, in laying by a store for bad times, and saving the
country from a crisis of destitution and strife."
Trades-unions ought to be doing for our workingmen what
trades-unions have already done in England. * * * It has
been by the power of combination among the workingmen,
developed through the trades-unions, that this long list of
beneficent legislation--factory acts, mines-regulation acts,
education acts, tenant-right acts, employers' liability
acts, acts against "truck," acts against cruelty to animals,
etc.--has been secured. It has been wrested from reluctant
parliaments by the manifestations of strength on the part of
the laboring classes. * * *
Our trades unions ought to be the means of securing one of
the great necessities of labor in this country--accurate and
generally diffused information concerning the state of the
labor-market. Were there any thorough combination in
existence on the part of these unions in hard times, there
could be diffused through the great centers of labor in the
East regular reports of the labor-market in the different
local centers of the country, such as would guide workingmen
in their search for opportunities of work. * * *
Another action that our labor unions might take in the
interest of the workingmen is in the development of
co-operation. The story of European co-operation is one of
the most encouraging tales of our modern industrial world.
Germany, for example, had in 1877 some 2,830 credit
societies; of which 806 reported 431,216 members; advances
for the year, in loans to their members, $375,000,000, with
a loss of one mark to every 416 thalers, or 23-4/5 cents on
every $297--an indication of soundness in their financial
operations that many capitalistic corporations might well
envy. The rapid growth of these societies is bringing the
omnipotence of credit to the aid of the workingmen in
Germany.
We have within the past decade had a most encouraging
growth of a somewhat similar form of co-operation in the
building and loan associations, which are now estimated to
number probably about 8,000 in the nation, with a membership
of 450,000, and an aggregated capital of $75,000,000.
The co-operative stores have reached a wonderful
development in England, with most beneficent results. There
were 765 stores reporting to the congress in 1881, which
showed aggregate sales of $65,703,990, with profits of
$435,000; while Scotland reported 226 stores in the same
year, representing sales of $17,423,170, and profits of
$113,665.
Against this showing our workingmen have comparatively
little to offer. We have, it is true, had a great deal more
of experimenting in co-operative distribution than is
ordinarily supposed. Co-operative stores began among us
between 1830 and 1840. The Workingmen's Protective Union
developed a great many stores at this time, which together
did a business in their best days ranging from $1,000,000 to
$2,000,000 per annum. In the decade 1860-70 there was an
extensive revival of co-operative stores; plans for
wholesale agencies being even discussed. A few of these
earlier stores still live. Two great national orders have
arisen, seeking to build up co-operative stores, among other
aims.
The Grangers had in 1876 twenty State purchasing agencies,
three of which did a business annually of $200,000, and one
of which did an annual business of $1,000,000. They claimed
to have, about the same time, five steamboat or packet
lines, fifty societies for shipping goods, thirty-two grain
elevators, twenty-two warehouses for storing goods. In 1876
one hundred and sixty Grange stores were recorded. In he
same year it was officially stated that "local stores are in
successful operation all over the country."
The Sovereigns of Industry also developed co-operative
distribution largely. In 1877 President Earle reported that
"ninety-four councils, selected from the whole, report a
membership of 7,273, and with an average capital of only
$884 did a business last year of $1,089,372.55. It is safe
to assume that the unreported sales will swell the amount to
at least $3,000,000."
There have been numerous stores started apart from these
orders. The finest success won is by the Philadelphia
Industrial Co-operative Society. Starting in 1875 with one
store, it has now six stores. Its sales for the quarter
ending February 18, 1882, were $51,413.63. A considerable
increase of interest in such stores marks the opening of our
decade. Stores are starting up in various parts of the
country. The Grangers claim to have now hundreds of
co-operative stores, upon the Rochdale plan, in successful
operation. Texas reports officially (1881) seventy-five
co-operative societies connected with this order. * * *
We had an epoch of brilliant enthusiasm over co-operative
agriculture in 1840-50, but little has been left from it.
One form of agricultural co-operation, a lower form, has
been astonishingly successful--the cheese-factories and
creameries. It is estimated that there are now 5,000 of them
in the country. In co-operative manufactures we have had
many experiments, but few successes, from 1849 onward.
Massachusetts reported twenty-five co-operative
manufactories in 1875. All of them, however, were small
societies.
Now, co-operation has its clearly marked limitations. It is
of itself no panacea for all the ills that labor is heir to.
But it can ameliorate some of the worst of those ills. It
can effect great savings for our workingmen, and can secure
them food and other necessaries of the best quality. If
nothing further arises, the spread of co-operation may
simply induce a new form of competition between these big
societies; but no one can study the history of the movement
without becoming persuaded that there is a moral development
carried on which will, in some way as yet not seen to us,
lead up the organization of those societies into some higher
generalization, securing harmony. It is constantly and
rightly said that business can never dispense with that
which makes the secret of capital's success in large
industry and trade, namely, generalship. Co-operation can,
it is admitted, capitalize labor for the small industries,
in which it is capable of making workingmen their own
employers, but it is said it can never, through committees
of management, carry on large industries or trade. I can,
however, see no reason why hereafter it may not enable large
associations to hire superior directing ability at high
salaries, just as paid generals give to republics the
leadership which kings used to supply in monarchies. There
are in the savings-banks of many manufacturing centers in
our country amounts which if capitalized would place the
workingmen of those towns in industrial independence; moneys
which, in some instances, are actually furnishing the
borrowed capital for their own employers. In such towns our
workingmen have saved enough to capitalize their labor, but
for lack of the power of combination, let the advantage of
their own thrift inure to the benefit of men already rich.
They save money and then loan it to rich men to use in
hiring them to work on wages, while the profits go to the
borrowers of labor's savings.
But the chief value of co-operation, in my estimate, is its
educating power. It opens a training school for labor in the
science and art of association.
Labor once effectively united could win its dues, whatever
they may be. The difficulties of such association have lain
in the undeveloped mental and moral condition of the rank
and file of the hosts of labor. * * *
Now, of this effort at co-operation I find scarcely any
trace in the trade organizations of our workingmen.
Trades-unions have until very lately passed the whole
subject by in utter silence. What has been done by
workingmen in this country in the line of co-operation has
been done outside of the great trade associations, which
form the natural instrumentalities for organizing such
combination. They offer the mechanism, the mutual knowledge,
the preliminary training in habits of combination, which
together should form the proper conditions for the
development of co-operation. Is it not a singular thing,
considering the manifold benefits that would come to labor
from such a development, that the attention of these great
and powerful organizations has not heretofore been seriously
called to this matter. * * *
The story of such attempts as have already been made in
this direction is one of a sad and discouraging nature to
all who feel the gravity of this problem. Again and again
great organizations have risen on our soil, seeking to
combine our trade associations and promising the millennium
to labor, only to find within a few years suspicion,
distrust, and jealousy eating the heart out of the order,
and disintegration following rapidly as a natural
consequence. The time must soon come let us hope, when the
lesson of these experiences will have been learned.
These are some of the salient faults of labor--faults which
are patent to all dispassionate observers. The first step to
a better state of things lies through the correction of
these faults. Whatever other factors enter into the problem,
this is the factor which it concerns labor to look after if
it would reach the equation of the good time coming. No
reconstruction of society can avail for incompetent,
indifferent, thriftless men who cannot work together.
Self-help must precede all other help. Dreamers may picture
utopias, where all our present laws are suspended, and
demagogues may cover up the disagreeable facts of labor's
own responsibility for its pitiful condition, but sensible
workingmen will remember that, as Renan told his countrymen
after the Franco-Prussian war, "the first duty is to face
the facts of the situation." There are no royal roads to an
honest mastery of fortune, though there seem to be plenty of
by-ways to dishonest success. Nature is a hard
school-mistress. She allows no makeshifts for the discipline
of hard work and of self-denial, for the culture of all the
strengthful qualities. Her American school for workers is
not as yet overcrowded. The rightful order of society is not
as yet submerged on our shores. There are the rewards of
merit for all who will work and wait. No man of average
intelligence needs to suffer in our country if he has clear
grit in him. "The stone that is fit for the wall," as the
Spanish proverb runs, "will not be left in the road."
II
FAULTS OF CAPITAL
But--for there is a very large "but" in the case--when all
this is said, only the thorough going _doctrinaire_ will
fail to see that merely half the case has been presented.
There is a shallow optimism which, from the heights of
prosperity, throws all the blame of labor's sufferings on
labor's own broad shoulders; steels the heart of society
against it because of these patent faults, and closes the
hand against its help, while it sings the gospel of the
Gradgrinds--"As it was and ever shall be. Amen."
Labor itself is not wholly responsible for its own faults.
These faults spring largely out of the defective social
conditions amid which the workingman finds himself placed.
Before we proceed to administer to him the whole measure of
the "whopping" due for his low estate, we had better look
back of him, to see why it is that he is as he is.
The inefficiency of labor is by no means the fault of the
individual laborer alone. Heredity has bankrupted him
before he started on his career. His parents were probably
as inefficient as he is--and most likely _their_ parents
also. One who sees much of the lower grades of labor ceases
to wonder why children turn out worthless, knowing what the
parents were. General Francis A. Walker, in opening the
Manufacturers' and Mechanics' Institute at Boston lately,
said:
"There is great virtue in the inherited industrial
aptitudes and instincts of the people. You can no more make
a first-class dyer or a first-class machinist in one
generation than you can in one generation make a Cossack
horseman or a Tartar herdsman. Artisans are born, not made."
Our incompetents may plead that they were not born
competent. It does not readily appear what we are going to
do about this working of heredity against labor, except as
by the slow and gradual improvement of mankind these low
strata of existences are lifted up to a higher plane.
Meanwhile we must blame less harshly and work a little more
earnestly to better the human stock.
The environment of labor handicaps still further this
organic deficiency. In most of our great cities the homes of
the workingmen are shockingly unwholesome; unsunned, badly
drained, overcrowded. The tenements of New York are enough
alone to take the life out of labor. City factories often
are not much better. The quality of the food sold in the
poorer sections of our cities--meat, bread, milk, etc.--is
defectively nutritious, even where it is not positively
harmful. The sanitary conditions are thus against labor.
This could be largely reflected by the State and city
authorities, and ought to be rectified in simple justice to
society at large, which is now so heavily burdened by the
manifold evils bred under such conditions. Government guards
carefully the rights both of land and capital by an immense
amount of legislation and administration. Has not labor a
fair claim to an equal solicitude on the part of the State?
Health is the laborer's source of wealth, but it is by no
means so farefully looked after as are the resources of the
other two factors of production. It is only within the last
three years that in New York we have had a satisfactory
tenement-house law or a fair administration of any law
bearing on this evil. There ought to be the exercise of some
such large wisdom as led the city of Glasgow to spend
$7,000,000 in reconstructing three thousand of the worst
tenements of that city, with a consequent reduction of the
death rate from 54 per thousand to 29 per thousand, and with
a corresponding decrease in pauperism and crime.
To this end our municipal governments should be taken out
of party politics and made the corporation business that
they are in German cities.
We have in none of the States of our Union any such
legislation as that of the thorough system of factory laws
in England, and we ought to supply the lack promptly.
Whatever may be said as to interference on the part of
legislation with the rights of capital, the sufficient
answer is that the whole advance of society has been a
constant interference on the part of legislation with the
merely natural action of the law of supply and demand; and
that only thus has England, for example, secured the immense
amelioration in the condition of the problem of labor and
capital which marks her state to-day.
It can be said also in this connection that if Government
has one business more peculiarly her own than another, it is
to look after the class that most needs looking after; and
that not simply from the interest of the class itself, which
would rarely supply a basis for governmental interference,
but in the interests of society at large--of the State
itself. The State's first concern is to see her citizens
healthful, vigorous, wealth-producing factors; and to this
end bad sanitary conditions, which undermine the
"health-capital" of labor, imperatively demand correction.
The deeper seated the roots of labor's inefficiency in
heredity and environment, the greater the need for an
education that will develop whatever potencies may lie
latent. Inefficiency will rarely correct itself. Superior
ability must train it into better power. Where is there any
proper provision for such an education?
State governments and our National Government have for a
number of years been fostering certain branches of
industrial education, chiefly in the line of agriculture.
The late report of the Bureau of Education upon industrial
education presents a very encouraging summary of what is
thus being done under the guidance of the State. It reports
concerning forty-three colleges aided by State grants to
give agricultural and mechanical training, besides a large
number of technical departments in other colleges,
industrial schools, evening classes for such instruction,
etc. Probably the finest example of industrial education
that the country possesses is found in the Hampton schools
in Virginia. Of attempts, however, to combine general and
intellectual education with practical training and
handicrafts we have few examples. The Hampton schools,
already alluded to, present one of the best. Professor
Adler's school in this city is very interesting in this
respect.
Our common schools have until lately signally passed by the
whole field of practical education. Drawing is at last being
generally introduced, and sewing is also being introduced to
a small extent, I believe, especially in New England. But
the schools which are supposed to be intended for the mass
of the people, and which are supplied at the public cost,
have made next to no provision for the practiced training of
boys and girls to become self-supporting men and
women--wealth-producing citizens; while the whole curriculum
of the school-system tends to a disproportionate
intellectuality, and to an alienation from all manual labor.
* * *
The necessity of the State's entering the educational field
is disputed by no one; but if it is to educate children at
the public cost it is bound, I think, to so educate its
wards that they shall return to society the taxation imposed
for their education. Its justification in becoming
school-master lies in the necessity of making out of the raw
material of life citizens who shall be productive factors in
the national wealth and conservators of its order. If,
therefore, it is justified in teaching the elementary
branches of education, if it is justified in adding to those
elementary branches departments that may be considered in
the nature of luxuries, how much more is it justified in
training the powers by which self-support shall be won and
wealth shall be added to society! * * *
That such efforts to encourage industrial education would
pay our Government is best seen in the example of England.
The International Exhibition of 1851 revealed to England its
complete inferiority to several continental countries in
art-industries, and the cause of that inferiority in the
absence of skilled workmen. The Government at once began to
study the problem, and out of this study arose the
Kensington Museum, with its art-schools, and similar
institutions throughout the country, which have already made
quick and gratifying returns in the improvement of the
national art-industries, and in the vast enrichment of the
trade growing therefrom.
Concerning the uninterestedness of labor and its too common
lack of any identification with capital, we must also look
beyond labor itself to find the full responsibility of this
evil.
The whole condition of industrial labor has changed in our
century. Contrast the state of such labor a century ago with
what it is now. Then the handicraftsman worked in his own
home, surrounded by his family, upon a task all the
processes of which he had mastered, giving him thus a sense
of interest and pride in the work being well and thoroughly
done. Now he leaves his home early and returns to it late,
working during the day in a huge factory with several
hundred other men. The subdivision of labor gives him now
only a bit of the whole process to do, where the work is
still done by hand, whether it be the making of a shoe or a
piano. He cannot be master of a craft, but only master of a
fragment of the craft. He cannot have the pleasure or pride
of the old-time workman, for he _makes_ nothing. He sees no
complete product of his skill growing into finished shape
in his hands. What zest can there be in this bit of manhood?
Steam machinery is slowly taking out of his hands even this
fragment of intelligent work, and he is set at feeding and
watching the great machine which has been endowed with the
brains that once were in the human toiler. Man is reduced to
being the tender upon a steel automaton which thinks and
plans and combines with marvelous power, leaving him only
the task of supplying it with the raw material, and of
oiling and cleansing it.
Some few machines require a skill and judgment to guide
them proportioned to their own astonishing capacities, and
for the elect workmen who manage and guide them there is a
new sense of the pleasure of power.
But, for the most part, mechanism takes the life out of
labor as the handicraft becomes the manufacture--or, more
properly, the _machino_-facture; and the problem of to-day
is, how to keep up the interest of labor in its daily task,
from which the zest has been stolen.
Manufacturers ought to see this problem and hasten to solve
it. Those who profit most by the present factory system
ought, in all justice, to be held responsible to those who
suffer most from it. They ought to be held morally bound to
make up to them in some way the interest in life that has
gone out with the old handicrafts. They could interest their
hands _out_ of the working hours, and in ways that would
give them a new interest _in_ their working hours. * * *
Not a few of our manufacturers are already opening their
eyes to the facts of the industrial problem, and, with
far-seeing generosity and human brotherliness that will,
according to the eternal laws, return even the good things
of this world unto them, they are providing their workingmen
with libraries, reading-rooms, and halls for lectures and
entertainments. They are encouraging and stimulating the
formation of literary and debating societies, bands, and
clubs, and such other things as give social fellowship and
mental interest. All this can be done at comparatively small
cost. The men in the employ of a great establishment can be
taught a new interest in their task as they learn to
understand its processes and the relation of these processes
to society at large, which can easily be done by lectures,
etc. Such work as this is a work that demands the
leadership, the organizing power, which the employer can
best furnish. At the last session of the Social Science
Association an interesting paper sketched some of these
efforts. In what wiser way could our wealthy manufacturers
use a portion of the money won for them by the labor which
has exhausted its own interest in its task?
Such personal interest on the part of employers in their
employees leads up to a clue to that other branch of the
uninterestedness of labor--its lack of identification with
the welfare of capital--its lack of any feeling of loyalty
toward the capitalist. How can anything else be fairly
expected in our present state of things from the _average_
workingman under the _average_ employer? I emphasize the
"average" because there are employees of exceptional
intelligence and honor, as there are employers of
exceptional conscientiousness, anxious to do fairly by their
men. The received political economy has taught the average
workingman that the relations of capital and labor are those
of hostile interests; that profits and wages are in an
inverse ratio; that the symbol of the factory is a see-saw,
on which capital goes up as labor goes down. As things are,
there is unfortunately too much ground for this notion, as
the workman sees.
Mr. Carroll D. Wright, in the fourteenth annual report of
the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor (1883), shows that in 1875
the percentage of wages paid to the value of production, in
over 2,000 establishments, was 24.68; and that in 1880 it
was 20.23. This means that the workingmen's share of the
returns of their own labor, so far from increasing, has
decreased one sixth in five years.
The workingman is disposed to believe in the light of such
figures that the large wealth accumulated by his employer
represents over and above a fair profit the increased wages
out of which he naturally regards himself as being mulcted.
He may be thick-headed, but he can see that in such a
see-saw of profits _versus_ wages the superior power of
capital has the odds all in its favor. He learns to regard
the whole state of the industrial world as one in which
_might_ makes _right_, and feebleness is the synonym of
fault.
How, in the name of all that is reasonable, can the average
man take much interest in his employer or identity himself
with that employer under such a state of things as the
economy sanctioned by the employer has taught him? This is
aggravated by the whole character of our modern industrial
system.
The factory system is a new feudalism, in which a master
rarely deals directly with his hands. Superintendents,
managers, and "bosses" stand between him and them. He does
not know them; they do not know him. The old common feeling
is disappearing. And--this is a significant point that it
behooves workingmen to notice--the intermediaries are
generally workingmen who have risen out of the ranks of
manual labor and have lost all fellow-feeling with their old
comrades, without gaining the larger sympathy with humanity
which often comes from better culture. The hardest men upon
workingmen are ex-workingmen. It is stated, on what seems to
be good authority, that the general superintendent of the
great corporation which lately has shown so hard a feeling
towards its operatives when on a strike was himself only ten
years ago a telegraph-operator.
A further aggravating feature of this problem is the
increasing tendency of capital to associated action. What
little knowledge of his employees or sympathy with them the
individual manufacturer might have is wholly lost in the
case of the corporation. To the stockholders of a great
joint-stock company, many of whom are never on the spot, the
hundreds of laborers employed by the company are simply
"hands"--as to whose possession of hearts or minds or souls
the by-laws rarely take cognizance. Here there is plainly a
case where capital--the party of brains and wealth--the head
of the industrial association, should lead off in a
systematic effort and renew, as far as may be, the old human
tie, for which no substitute has ever been devised.
To conciliate the interests of the classes, and identify
labor with capital, individual employers must re-establish
personal relationships between themselves and their men.
What might be done in this way, and how, this being done,
the present alienation of feeling on the part of our
working-men would largely disappear, must be evident to any
one who has watched some of the beautiful exemplifications
of this relationship which have already grown into being on
our shores. I know of one large manufacturer, in a city not
a hundred miles from this, who started to enter the ministry
as a young man, but found to his intense disappointment that
he had no aptitude for the work of a preacher, and turned
his attention, on the insistent advice of those nearest to
him, to active business. He took up the business which his
father had left him at his death and had left largely
involved. His first task was to pay off, dollar for dollar,
all the debts which his father had bequeathed him, although
in most instances they had been compromised by his
creditors. He then threw the energy of his being into
development of the business, and, in the course of a few
years, put it at the forefront of that line in his native
city. Into his business he breathed the spirit of love to
God and man which had moved him originally to take up the
work of the ministry. He felt himself ordained to be what
Carlyle would have called a "captain of industry." From the
start he established personal, human, living relationships
with his men. He taught them by deed rather than by word to
consider him their friend. He was in the habit of calling in
upon their families in a social and respecting way. In all
their troubles and adversities he trained them to counsel
with him, and gave them the advantage of his riper judgment
and larger vision. In cases of exigency his means were at
their service in the way of loans to tide them over the hard
times. His friends have seen, more than once, coming from
his private office some of the hard-fisted men of toil in
his employ, with tears streaming down their faces. He had
called them into the office on hearing of certain bad habits
into which they had fallen, and so impressive had been his
talk with them, that they left his presence with the most
earnest resolves to do better in the future. The result of
all this relationship has been that during some fifteen
years of the management of this large business he has rarely
changed his men, and while strikes have abounded around him
he has never known a strike.
I hold in my possession a letter from one of our leading
iron-manufacturers in this country, who, in response to an
appeal for participation in a charity of this city, gave
answer that it had been a practice of the firm to invest a
certain portion of their profits in developing the comforts
of their workingmen, and that they were obliged to limit
their desire to give in charity in order that they might be
able to build homes, club-rooms, reading-rooms, and all the
_et ceteras_ of a really civilized community in their
work-village. These are examples, in our own country, of
what might be done.
One of the most beautiful models that I know of in modern
history is furnished by the town to which reference has
already been made--the town of Mulhouse, where, after some
thirty years, the spirit of brotherliness has so entered
into the relationships of capital and labor that a firm
would be disreputable which there attempted to carry on
business as business is ordinarily done here. All the
manufacturers plan out, organize, and carry on what to most
of us would seem impossible schemes for the amelioration and
uplifting of the condition of their working people. No one
wonders that, as he walks through the town which his large
hearted philanthropy imbued with this fine spirit, the
workingmen salute the originator of these schemes as "Father
Peter."
In addition to this personal, human relationship, capital
might and should, in all justice and humanity, identify the
pecuniary interests of labor with its own interests. What is
known as industrial partnership is simply a solution of this
branch of the problem. The principle is simply that of
giving labor a pecuniary interest in the profits of the
establishment _pro rata_ with his own wages. A _bonus_ is
set on frugality and industry and conscientiousness of work
by making the hands small partners in the concern. * * *
End of Project Gutenberg's Black and White, by Timothy Thomas Fortune