Black and White Part 18

--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 s.p.a.ce 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 ma.s.s of miserably paid labor--that is, of impoverished and degraded labor. The average wages of 1880 indicated that this ma.s.s 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 sh.o.r.es.

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 a.s.sume 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 cla.s.s 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 ident.i.ty 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 a.s.sociation 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 subst.i.tute 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 a.s.sociation 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 dest.i.tution 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 cla.s.ses. * * *

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 a.s.sociations, 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.