Among the more prominent movements of the day for the improvement of the
condition of the working men are those which are growing into fashion
with large manufacturing incorporations. Their promise lies immediately
in the fact that they call for no new convictions of political economy,
and hence have nothing disturbing or revolutionary about them. Accepting
the usages and economical principles of industrial life, as the progress
of business has developed them, an increasing number of large
manufacturers have deemed it to their interest not only to furnish shops
and machinery for their operatives, but dwellings as well, and in some
instances the equipments of village life, such as schools, chapels,
libraries, lecture and concert halls, and a regime of morals and
sanitation. Probably the most expensive investment of this sort in the
United States, if not in the world, by any single company, is that of
Pullman, on Lake Calumet, a few miles south of Chicago, an enterprise as
yet scarcely five years old. It is by no means a novel undertaking,
except in the magnitude, thoroughness, and unity of the scheme. Twenty
years ago the managers of the Lonsdale Mills, in Rhode Island, were
erecting cottages on a uniform plan and maintaining schools and religious
services for their operatives. More recent but more extensive is the
village of the Ponemah Cotton Mill, near Taftville, Conn. These are
illustrations merely of similar investments upon a smaller scale
elsewhere. But the European examples are older, such as Robert Owen's
experiment at New Lanark in Scotland, Saltaire in Yorkshire, Dollfuss'
Mulhausen Quarter in Alsace, and M. Godin's community in the French
village of Guise, which are among the more familiar instances of
investments originally made on business principles, with a view to the
improved conditions of workmen. New Lanark failed as a commercial
community through the visionary character of its founder; the Godin works
at Guise have passed into the co-operative phase within the past five
years, but Saltaire and Mulhausen still retain their proprietary business
features.
The class of ventures of which these instances are but the more
conspicuous examples has peculiar characteristics. They differ from the
Peabody and Waterlow buildings of London, described in _Bradstreet's_
last August, from Starr's Philadelphia dwellings, and from the operations
of the "Improved Dwellings Association" of New York in these particulars:
the latter are financially a pure question of direct investment; are
mainly concerned with life among the poor of cities, and, whatever
philanthropy may be in their motive, are capable of adaptation to any
class of citizens. The former, while investments also, are composite, the
business of manufacturing being associated with that of rent collecting
and sharing its profits and losses; their field of operations is almost
invariably rural, and tenancy is restricted to the employes of the
proprietor. On the other hand, they differ from all co-operative and
socialistic communities in that they are an adaptation to existing
circumstances, propose to demonstrate no new theories of economics, are
free from all religious bonds, do not depend on any unity of opinion, and
do not touch the question of the proper distribution of wealth.
It is, of course, no new thing for owners of large factories,
particularly in country districts, to furnish tenements for their
operatives, and oftentimes it is quite indispensable that they should,
because there would otherwise be no accommodation for their workmen. What
is recent and exceptional is the spread of the belief that it pays to
make the accommodations furnished healthful, convenient, and attractive.
The sources of profit from this careful provision are these: the
proprietors have control of the territory, and are able to prescribe
regulations which keep out the saloon and disreputable characters, and at
once there is a saving in police and court and poor taxes; for the same
reason the workmen are more regular and steady in their labor, for there
is no St. Monday holiday, nor confused head and uncertain hand; the
tenants are better able to pay their rents, and when their landlord and
employer are the same person, he collects his rent out of the wages; the
superior accommodations and more settled employment act strongly against
labor strikes. It will be seen that the larger and better product of
labor is a great factor in the profitableness of such enterprises, and
that it arises from the improved character of the laborer, on the same
principle that a farmer's stock pays him best when it is of good breed,
is warmly housed, and well fed. Against the operations of the London
Peabody and Waterlow funds it has been alleged that they dispossess the
poor shiftless tenant and bring in a new class, so that they do not
improve the condition of their tenants, but afford opportunity for better
ones to cheapen the price of their accommodations. The manufacturing
landlord cannot wholly do this, because the first thing he has to
consider is whether the applicant for a dwelling is a good workman, not
whether he can be trusted for his rent. His labor he must have. His
outlook is to make that labor worth more to him, by placing it in the
best attainable surroundings. Can this be done? If so, the ends of
humanity are answered as well as the purse filled, for both interests
correspond.
Mr. Pullman, who founded the enterprise on Calumet Lake, has uttered
sentiments like these, and has proved that in this instance it does pay
to make his workmen's families comfortable, and secure from sickness and
temptation. As a financial operation Pullman is profitable. There are now
1,700 dwellings, either separate or in apartment houses, in this town,
where five years ago the prairie stretched on every side unbroken. Every
tenement is connected with common sewerage, water, and gas systems, in
which the most scientific principles and expert skill have been applied.
The price of tenements ranges from $5 per month for two rooms in an
apartment house to $16 for a separate dwelling of five rooms; but there
is a different class of houses for clerks, superintendents, and
overseers. The average price per room is $3.30 a month, or nearly twelve
per cent. higher than in Massachusetts manufacturing towns, where it is
$2.86. Taking each tenement at an average of three rooms, this rate will
pay six per cent. on an investment of $3,140,000, without taking into
account taxes and repairs, or say six per cent. on $3,000,000. But one
source of profit of great moment must not be overlooked, and it is the
appreciation of real estate by the increase of population. This is a
small factor in a great city, at least so far as concerns the humbler
grade of dwellings, but in the country it is enormous. A tract of land
which has been a farm becomes a village of from 1,000 to 10,000
inhabitants. Its value advances by leaps and bounds.
At Pullman, in addition to the shops and dwellings, there are trees and
turf-bordered malls and squares, a church, a theater, a free library with
reading rooms, a public hall, a market house, provided at the expense of
the company. Liquor can only be sold at the hotel to its guests, and then
under restrictions. There is a system of public schools under a board of
education, which is about the only civic organization, strictly speaking,
in the community. One man suffices for police duty, and he made but
fifteen arrests in the last two years. It is reported that the death rate
so far, including the mortality from accidents, has been under seven in
1,000 per annum. In Great Britain the rate is a small fraction over 22 in
1,000. The vital statistics of the United States show a smaller mortality
than this, but they are rendered abnormal by the heavy immigration which
pours into the country. Emigrants are, in the language of insurance men,
a selected class. They are usually at the most vigorous time of life and
of hardiest and most enterprising spirit.
They leave behind them the very young and the old and those enfeebled by
disease or habits. To this cause must be attributed in part the
exceptional record of Pullman in death rate, as it is a new town. Yet
there can be no question that the sanitary conditions of the place are
excellent. It is difficult in mixed enterprises of this nature to tell
what the rate of profit upon the tenement part of the business is, since
the rental and the factory react upon each other; but in the American
instances quoted in this article the investment as a whole is
remunerative. In the Godin operations at Guise, which have been
co-operative for the last five years, the capital is put at $1,320,000,
and the net earnings have averaged during that time $204,640 per annum,
or 15½ per cent.
At Pullman a demand has arisen on the part of the tenants for a chance to
acquire proprietorship in their homes; and while the company has withheld
the privilege from its original purchase of 3,500 acres, it has bought
adjoining land, where it offers to advance money for building, and to
take pay in monthly installments. This assimilates so much of the
enterprise to that at Mulhausen, and shows the drift toward a
co-operative phase of capital and labor. Indeed, this tendency will
probably prove to be strongly characteristic of all similar schemes as
fast as they attain to any magnitude. Tendencies which can be resisted in
communities of few hundreds become overpowering when the population rises
into thousands. But from the purely commercial point of view, this drift
is hardly to be deprecated, so long as the operation of selling houses
returns the capital and interest safely.
Projects of this nature go far toward modifying the stress of antagonisms
between labor and capital, because if they are successful these are
harmonized to an appreciable extent, and this gives public interest to
them. The eventual adjustment must come, not from convictions of duty,
doctrinaire opinions, or sentiments of sympathy, but on business
principles, and it is a sure step in advance to show that self-interest
and philanthropy are in accord. How great the field for experiments of
this nature is in the United Spates may be gathered from the census of
1880, which shows 2,718,805 persons employed in the industrial
establishments of the country, with an annual production of
$5,842,000,000, and a capital of nearly half that amount. Of these hands
and values nearly two-thirds belong to the north Atlantic
States,--_Bradstreet's_.
* * * * *