of industry: these have given the average man a high degree of
efficiency and therefore a high degree of prosperity as compared with
the lot of the average man in Asia or Europe--a prosperity heightened
and enhanced, it is true, by the exploitation of a new continent's
virgin resources, but, after all, due mainly, primarily, as we have
said, to the high degree of efficiency with which the average man does
his work.
And while there may be "too much Ego in our Cosmos," as Kipling's
German said about the monkey, for us to like to admit it, the plain
truth is that, no matter what our business, we chiefly owe our
prosperity not to our own efforts, but to the high standards of
intelligence, efficiency, and prosperity on the part of our people as
a whole. We live in better homes, eat more wholesome food, wear better
clothing, have more leisure {174} and more recreation, endure less
bitter toil; in short, we find human life fairer and sweeter than our
fellow man in Asia, not because you or I as individuals deserve so
much better than he, but because of our richer racial heritage. We
have been born into a society where a higher level of prosperity
obtains, where a man's labor and effort count for more.
In China a member of the Emperor's Grand Council told me that the
average rate of wages throughout the empire for all classes of labor
is probably 18 cents a day. In Japan it is probably not more, and in
India much less. The best mill workers I saw in Osaka average 22 cents
a day; the laborers at work on the new telephone line in Peking get 10
cents; wheelbarrow coolies in Shanghai $4 a month; linotype operators
in Tokyo 45 cents a day, and pressmen 50; policemen 40; the
ironworkers in Hankow average about 10 cents; street-car conductors in
Seoul make 35 cents; farm laborers about Nankou 10 cents; the highest
wages are paid in the Philippines, where the ordinary laborer gets
from 20 to 50 cents.
Since writing the foregoing I have looked up the latest official
statistics for Japan in the "Financial and Economic Annual for
1910," the latest figures compiled to date being for 1908. In 1908
wages had increased on the whole 40 per cent, above 1900 figures,
and I give herewith averages for certain classes of workmen for 1899
and 1908:
Daily Wages in Cents
1899 1908
Farm laborer, male $0.13 $0.19
Farm laborer, female .08-1/2 .11-1/2
Gardener .24 .34
Weaver, male .15 .22
Weaver, female .09 .12
Shoemaker .22-1/2 .32-1/2
Carpenter .25 .40
Blacksmith .23 .34
Day laborer .17 .26-1/2
When I asked Director Matsui what he paid the hands I saw at work on
the Agricultural College farm, he answered, "Well, being so near
Tokyo, we have to pay 30 to 40 sen (15 to 20 cents) a day, but in
the country, generally, I should say 20 to 35 sen" (10 to 13-1/2
cents a day).
{175}
Moreover, there is a savage struggle for employment even at these low
figures; men work longer hours than in America, and their tasks are
often heart-sickening in their heaviness: tasks such as an American
laborer would regard as inhuman.
Take, for example, the poor fellow who pulls the jinrikisha. He is
doing the work that horses and mules do at home, and for wages such as
our Southern negroes would refuse for ordinary labor. More than this,
in most cases he is selling you not only his time but his life-blood.
Run he must with his human burden, and faster than Americans would
care to run without a burden; and the constant strain overtaxes his
heart and shortens his days. More than this, he must go in all kinds
of weather, and having become thoroughly heated, must shiver in the
winter wind or driving rain during waits. The exposure and the
overtaxing of the heart are alike ruinous. The rickshaw man's life, I
was told in Japan, is several years shorter than that of the average
man.
And yet so many men are driven by the general poverty into the
rickshaw business that I have hardly found a city in which it is not
overcrowded. In Peking on one occasion I almost thought my life
endangered by the mob who jostled, tugged, and fought for the
privilege of earning the 15 or 20 cents fare my patronage involved. In
Hong Kong two runners, wild-eyed with the keenness of the savage
struggle for existence, menaced the smaller, younger man I had hired
as if they would take me by force from his vehicle to their own--and
this for a climb so steep that I soon got out and walked rather than
feel myself guilty of "man's inhumanity to man" by making a fellow
being pull me. Fiercer yet was the competition in Hankow, where not
even the brutal clubbing of the policeman was enough to keep the men
in order. In wintry Newchwang I think I suffered almost as much as my
rickshaw man did merely to see him wading through mud and foulness
such as I should not wish my horse to go through at home--though if he
had {176} not waded I should have had to, and he was the more used to
it!
I mention the hard life of the Oriental laborer who pulls the
jinrikisha because it is typical. The business would not be crowded if
it were not that the men find life in other lines no better. Consider
the men who carried me in my sedan chair in Canton. As each man fitted
the wooden shafts over his shoulders I could see that they were welted
with corns like a mule's shoulders chafed by the hames through many a
summer's plowing.
Consider, too, the thousands of Chinese and Japanese who do the work
not of carriage horses, but of draft horses. From the time you land in
Yokahoma your heart is made sick by the sight of half-naked
human-beings harnessed like oxen to heavily laden carts and drays.
Bent, tense, and perspiring like slaves at the oar, they draw their
heavy burdens through the streets. One or two men wearily pull an
immense telegraph pole balanced on a two-wheeled truck. Eight or ten
men are harnessed together dragging some merchant's heavy freight.
Four to a dozen other men carry some heavy building-stone or piece of
machinery by running bamboo supports from the shoulders of the men
behind to the shoulders of the men in front: you can see the constant,
tortuous play of the muscles around each man's rigid backbone while
the strained, monotonous, half-weird chorus, "Hy-ah! Hullah! Hee-ah!
Hey!" measures their tread and shifts the strain from man to man, step
by step, with the precision of clock work. On the rivers in China,
too, one sees boats run by human treadmill power: a harder task than
that of Sisyphus is that of the men who sweat all day long at the
wheel, forever climbing and never advancing.
Nor do the women and children of the Orient escape burdens such as
only men's strong shoulders should bear. Children who should have the
freedom that even the young colt gets--how my heart has gone out to
them cheated out of the joys {177} of childhood! And the women with
children strapped on their backs while they steer boats and handle
passengers and traffic about Hong Kong! Or leave, if you will, the
water-front at Hong Kong and make the hard climb up the steep,
bluff-like, 1800-foot mountainside, dotted with the handsome
residences of wealthy Englishmen: you can hardly believe that every
massive timber, every ton of brick, every great foundation-stone was
carried up, up from the town below, by the tug and strain of human
muscle--and not merely human muscle, but in most cases the muscles of
women! Probably no governor in any state in America lives in a
residence so splendid as that of the governor-general of Hong
Kong--certainly no governor's residence is so beautifully situated,
halfway up a sheer mountain-slope--and yet the wife of the
governor-general told me that the material used in the building was
brought up the mountainside by women!
Hardly better fare the women in the factories. I mentioned in a former
letter the mills in Shanghai where women work 13-1/4 hours for 12
cents a day; and in most cases the women in Eastern factories are
herded together in crowded compounds little better than the workhouses
for American criminals!
Or consider the rice farmers who wade through mud knee-deep to plant
the rice by hand, cultivate it with primitive tools, and harvest it
with sickles. And after all this, they must often sell the rice they
grow, and themselves buy cheaper millet or poorer rice for their own
food. The situation has probably improved somewhat since Col. Charles
Denby published his book five years ago, but in its general outlines
the plight of the typical Chinese farmer as described by him then is
true to-day:
"The average wage of an able-bodied young man is $12 per annum, with
food and lodging, straw shoes, and free shaving--an important item in
a country where heads must be shaved three or four times a month.
His clothing costs about $4 per annum. In ten years he may buy one
third of an acre of land ($150 per acre) and necessary implements.
In ten years more he may {178} double his holdings and become
part-owner in a water buffalo. In six years more he can procure a
wife and live comfortably on his estate. Thus in twenty-six years he
has gained a competence."
So much by way of a faint picture of existing industrial conditions in
the Orient. Let us now see what there is for us to learn from these
facts.
First of all, we may inquire why such conditions obtain. Why is it
that the Oriental gets such low wages, and has such low earning power?
"An overcrowded population," somebody answers, "in China, for example,
four hundred million people--one fourth the human race--crowded within
the limits of one empire. This is the cause."
I don't believe it.
There is a limit no doubt beyond which increase of population, even
with the most highly developed system of industry, might lead to such
a result, but I do not believe that this limit has been reached even
in China. The people in England live a great deal better to-day than
they did when England had only one tenth its present population. The
average man in your county has more conveniences, comforts, and a
better income than he had in your grandfather's day when the
population was not nearly so dense. The United States with a
population of ninety odd million pays its laborers vastly better than
it did when its population was only thirty million.
The truth is that every man should be able to earn a little more than
he consumes; there should be a margin, an excess which should
constitute his contribution to the "commonwealth," to the race. Our
buildings, roads, railroads, churches, cathedrals, works of
art--everything which makes the modern world a better place to live in
than the primitive world was: these represent the combined
contributions of all previous men and races. And if society is so able
to handle men that they produce any fraction more than they consume,
the more men the better the world.
{179}
My conviction is that the Oriental nations are poor, not because of
their dense populations, but because of their defective industrial
organizations, because they do not provide men Tools and Knowledge to
work with.
Ignorance and lack of machinery--these have kept Asia poor; knowledge
and modern tools--these have made America rich.
If Asia had a Panama Canal to dig, she would dig it with picks, hoes,
and spades and tote out the earth in buckets. Nothing but human bone
and sinew would be employed, and the men would be paid little, because
without tools and knowledge they must always earn little. But America
puts brains, science, steam, electricity, machinery into the Big
Ditch--Tools and Knowledge, in other words--and she pays good wages
because a man thus equipped does the work of ten men whose only force
is the force of muscle.
But Asia--deluded, foolish Asia--has scorned machinery. "The more work
machinery does, the less there will be for human beings to do. Men
will be without work, and men without work will starve." With this
folly on her lips she has rejected the agencies that would have
rescued her from her never-ending struggle with starvation.
Oftentimes, we know, the same cry has been heard in England--and alas!
even in America; our labor unions even now sometimes lend a willing
ear to such nonsense. There were riots in England when manufacturers
sought to introduce labor-saving methods in cotton-spinning; and when
railroads were introduced among us there were doubtless thousands of
draymen, stage-drivers, and boatmen who, if they had dared, would have
torn up the rails and thrown them into the rivers, as the Chinese did
along the Yangtze-Kiang. With much the same feeling the old-time hand
compositors looked upon the coming of the typesetting machine.
And yet with all our engines doing the work of millions of draymen and
cabmen, with all our factory-machines doing the {180} work of hundreds
of thousands of weavers and spinners, with all our telegraphs and
telephones taking the place of numberless messengers, runners, and
errand boys, and with a population, too, vastly in excess of the
population when old-fashioned methods prevailed, the fact stands out
that labor has never been in greater demand and has never commanded
higher wages than to-day.
With a proper organization of industry it seems to me that it must
ever be so--certainly as far ahead as we can look into the future.
When a machine is invented which enables one man to do the work it
formerly required two men to do in producing some sheer necessity for
mankind, an extra man is released or freed to serve mankind by the
production of some comfort or luxury, or by ministering to the things
of the mind and the spirit.
And it is the duty of society and government, it may be said just
here, to facilitate this result, to provide education and equality of
opportunity so that each man will work where his effort will mean most
in human service. Knowledge or education not only cuts the shackles
which chain a man down to a few occupations, not only sets him free to
labor where he can work best, but is also itself a productive
agency--a tool with which a man may work better.
Take the simple fact that cowpeas gather nitrogen from the air: a man
may harness this scientific truth, use it and set it to work, and get
results, profits, power, from it, as surely as from a harnessed horse
or steam engine. And so with every other useful bit of knowledge under
heaven. Knowledge is power.
{181}
[Illustration: "SOCIETY BELLES" OF MINDANAO, PHILIPPINE ISLANDS.]
[Illustration: A STREET SCENE IN MANILA.]
{182}
[Illustration: TWO KINDS OF WORKERS IN BURMA .]
One of the pleasures of being "on the road to Mandalay" was to see
the--
"Elephints a-pilin' teak
In the sludgy, squdgy creek"
The elephants of Rangoon are as fascinating as the camels of Peking.
But one never gets hardened to the every-day Oriental spectacle of
human beings harnessed like oxen to weary burdens, many of which
make those in the lower picture look light by comparison.
{180 continued}
All this doctrine Asia has rejected, or has never even got to the
point of considering. In America a motorman or conductor by means of
tools and knowledge--a street-car for a tool and the science of
electricity for knowledge--transports forty people from one place to
another. These men are high-priced laborers considered from an
Oriental standpoint and yet {183} it costs you only five cents for
your ride, and five minutes' time. In Peking, on the other hand, it
takes forty men pulling rickshaws to transport the forty passengers;
and though the pullers are "cheap laborers," it costs you more money
and an hour's time to get to your destination--even if you are so
lucky as not to be taken to the wrong place.
Forty men to do the work that two would do at home! Men and women
weavers doing work that machines would do at home. Grain reaped with
sickles instead of with horses and reapers as in America. Sixteen men
at Hankow to carry baggage that one man and a one-horse dray would
carry in New York. Women carrying brick, stone, and timber up the
mountainside at Hong Kong--and the Chinese threatened a general riot
when the English built a cable-car system up the incline; they
compelled the owners to sign an agreement to transport passengers
only--never freight! No sawmills in the Orient, but thousands of men
laboriously converting logs into lumber by means of whipsaws. No
pumps, even at the most used watering places, but buckets and ropes:
often no windlass. No power grain-mills, but men and women, and, in
some cases, asses and oxen, doing the work that the idle water-powers
are given no chance to do.
These are but specimen illustrations. In the few industries where
machinery and knowledge are brought into play ordinary labor is as yet
but little better paid than in other lines because such industries are
not numerous enough to affect the general level of wages. The net
result of her policy of refusing the help of machinery is that Asia
has not doubled a man's chances for work, but she has more than halved
the pay he gets for that work. And why? Because she has reduced his
efficiency. A man must get his proportion of the common wealth, and
where the masses are shackled, hampered by ignorance and poor tools,
they produce little, and each man's share is little.
Suppose you are a merchant: what sort of trade could you hope for
among a people who earn 10 cents a day--the head {184} of a family
getting half enough to buy a single meal in a second-rate restaurant?
Or if you are a banker, what sort of deposits could you get among such
a people? Or if a railroad man, how much traffic? Or if a
manufacturer, how much business? Or if a newspaper man, how much
circulation? Or if a doctor, lawyer, teacher, or preacher, how much
income?
Very plain on the whole must be my two propositions:
(1) That the Asiatic laborer is poor, the American laborer well-to-do,
because the Asiatic earns little, the American much--a condition due
to the fact that the American doubles, trebles, or quadruples his
productive capacity, his earning power, by the use of tools and
knowledge, machinery and education. The Oriental does not.
(2) Your prosperity, in whatever measure you have it; the fact that
your labor earns two, three, or ten times what you would get for it if
you had been born in Asia; this is due in the main, not to your
personal merit, but to your racial inheritance, to the fact that you
were born among a people who have developed an industrial order, have
provided education and machinery, tools and knowledge, in such manner
that your services to society are worth several times as much as would
be the case if you were in the Orient, where education has never
reached the common people.
Pity--may God pity!--the man who fancies he owes nothing to the
school, who pays his tax for education grudgingly as if it were a
charity--as if he had only himself to thank for the property on which
the government levies a pitiable mill or so for the advancement and
diffusion of knowledge among mankind. Pity him if he has not
considered; pity him the more if, having considered, he is small
enough of soul to repudiate the debt he owes the race. But for what
education has brought us from all its past, but for what it has
wrought through the invention of better tools and the better
management (through increased knowledge) of all the powers with which
men labor, our close-fisted, short-sighted {185} taxpayer would
himself be living in a shelter of brush, shooting game with a bow and
arrow, cultivating corn with a crooked stick! Most of what he has he
owes to his racial heritage; it is only because other men prosper that
he prospers. And yet owing so much to the Past, he would do nothing
for the Future; owing so much to the progress the race has made, he
would do nothing to insure a continuance of that progress.
"Line upon line; precept upon precept." At the risk of possible
redundancy, therefore, let me conclude by repeating: Whatever
prosperity you enjoy is largely due to what previous generations have
done for increasing man's efficiency by means of knowledge and tools;
your first duty to your fellows is to help forward the same agencies
for human uplift in the future. And while this is the first duty of
the individual, it is even more emphatically the first duty of a
community or a commonwealth.
This is Asia's most important lesson for America.
Singapore, Straits Settlements.
{186}
XIX
THE STRAITS SETTLEMENTS AND BURMA
The Straits Settlements and Burma I have seen in the dead of winter,
and yet with no suggestion of snow, bare fields, or leafless trees.
The luxuriant green of the foliage is never touched by frost, and in
Singapore, only seventy-seven miles from the equator, summer and
winter are practically alike.
"But you must remember that we are here in the wintertime," a
fellow-traveller remarked when another had expressed his surprise at
not finding it hotter than it really was--the speaker evidently
forgetting that at the equator December is as much a summer month as
July, and immediately south of it what are the hot months with us
become the winter months there. And Singapore is so close to the
equator that for it "all seasons are summer," and the _punkah wallas_
(the coolies who swing the big fans by which the rooms are made
tolerable) must work as hard on Christmas Day as on the Fourth of
July.
The vegetation in the Straits Settlements is such as writers on the
tropics have made familiar to us. The graceful cocoanut palms are
silhouetted against the sky in all directions; the dense, heavy
foliage of the banana trees is seen on almost every street; the
sprawling, drunken banyan tree, a confusion of roots and branches,
casts its dense shadows on the grateful earth; and all around the city
are rubber plantations, immense pineapple fields, and uncleared
jungle-land in which wild beasts and poisonous serpents carry on the
unending {187} life-and-death struggle between the strong and the weak.
Singapore, in fact, is said to have been called "the Lion City" for a
long while because of the great number of lions found in the
neighborhood. I saw the skins of elephants and tigers killed nearby,
and also the skin of a Singapore alligator fifteen feet long.
There is probably no place on earth in which there have been brought
together greater varieties of the human species than in Singapore. I
was told that sixty languages are spoken in the city, and if diversity
of color may be taken as an indication of diversity of language, I am
prepared to believe it. There are many Indians or Hindus, most of them
about as black as our negroes, but with the features of the Caucasian
in the main--sharp noses, thin lips, and straight glossy black hair;
but 72 per cent, of the population of Singapore is Chinese.
It is interesting to observe that John Chinaman seems to flourish
equally in the Tropics and in the Temperate Zone. Here in Singapore
under an equatorial sun, or in Canton on the edge of the Tropics, he
seems as energetic, as unfailing in industry, as he is in wintry
Mukden or northern Mongolia. For hours after sunset many of the
Chinese shops in Singapore present as busy an appearance as at
mid-day, and the pigtailed rickshaw men, with only a loin-cloth about
their bare bodies, seem to run as fast and as far as they would if
they were in Peking.
The Chinese are a wonderful people, and I am more and more impressed
with the thought of what a hand they are to have in the world's
affairs a hundred years hence when they get thoroughly "waked up."
They were first brought to Singapore, I understand, as common
laborers, but now their descendants are among the wealthiest men and
women in the place and ride around in automobiles, while descendants
of their one-time employers walk humbly on the adjacent sidewalks. It
is a tribute to the untiring industry, shrewdness, and business skill
of the Chinaman that nowadays when people {188} anywhere speak of
desiring Celestials as laborers, they add, "Provided they are under
contract to return to China when the work is finished, and do not
remain to absorb the trade and wealth of the country."