Where Half The World Is Waking Up Part 15

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.

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[Ill.u.s.tration: "SOCIETY BELLES" OF MINDANAO, PHILIPPINE ISLANDS.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A STREET SCENE IN MANILA.]

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[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 pa.s.sengers; 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 pa.s.sengers 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 windla.s.s. No power grain-mills, but men and women, and, in some cases, a.s.ses and oxen, doing the work that the idle water-powers are given no chance to do.

These are but specimen ill.u.s.trations. 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 ma.s.ses 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 G.o.d 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.

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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."

From Singapore we made a very interesting trip to Joh.o.r.e, a little kingdom about the size of ten ordinary counties, and with a population of about 350,000. The soil and climate along the route are well suited to the cultivation of rubber trees, and considerable areas have recently been cleared of the dense jungle growth and set to young rubber plants. One of my friends who has a rubber plantation north of Singapore says that while rubber is selling now at only $1.50 a pound as compared with $3 a pound a few months ago, there are still enormous profits in the business, as the rubber should not cost over 25 cents a pound to produce. Some of the older plantations paid dividends of 150 per cent, last year, and probably set aside something for a rainy day in addition.

Yet not even these facts would have justified the wild speculation in rubber, the unreasoning inflation in values, which proved a veritable "Mississippi Bubble" for so many investors in Europe and Asia last year. Shares worth $5 or $10 were grabbed by eager buyers at $100 each. I know of a specific instance where a plantation bought for $16,000 was capitalized at $230,000, or 20 for 1, and the stock floated. When the madness had finally spent itself and people began to see things as they were, not only individuals, but whole communities, found themselves prostrated. Shanghai will not recover for years, and some of its citizens--the young fellow with a $1500 income who incurred a $30,000 debt in the scramble, for example--are left in practical bondage for life as a result. The men who have gone into the rubber-growing industry on a strictly business basis, however, are likely to find it profitable for a long time to come.

The cocoanut industry is also a profitable one, although the modest average of 10 per cent., year in and year out, has {189} not appealed to those who have been indulging in pipe dreams about rubber. Where transportation facilities are good, the profits from cocoanuts probably average considerably in excess of 10 per cent., for the trees require little care, and it is easy for the owners to sell the product without going to any trouble themselves. In one section of the Philippines, I know, the Chinese pay one peso (50 cents gold) a tree for the nuts and pick them themselves. And when we consider the great number of the slim-bodied trees that may grow upon an acre, it is not surprising to hear that many owners of cocoanut groves or plantations live in Europe on the income from the groves, going to no trouble whatever except to have the trees counted once a year.

Penang, where we spent only a day, is almost literally in the midst of an immense cocoanut plantation, and I was much interested in seeing the half-naked Hindus gathering the unhusked fruit for shipment. The tall, limbless trunks of the trees, surmounted only by a top-knot of fruit and foliage, are in nearly every case gapped and notched at intervals of about three feet to furnish toe-hold for the natives in climbing.

After tiffin on this winter day, instead of putting on gloves and overcoats, we went out on a gra.s.sy lawn, clad in linen and pongee as we were, and luxuriated in the cool shade of the palm trees. The dense foliage of the tropical jungle was in sight from our place by the seaside, and in the garden not far away were cinnamon trees, cloves, orchids, rubber trees, the poisonous upas, and palms of all varieties known.

Penang is a rather important commercial centre, and exports more tin than any other place on earth. The metal is shipped in molten bars like lead or pig iron, and to one who has a.s.sociated tin only with light buckets, cups, and dippers, it is surprising how much strength it takes to move a bar of the solid metal the size of a small watermelon.

The imports of Penang are also not inconsiderable, and in walking through the warehouses along the wharves I was {190} struck by the number of boxes, crates, bales, and bundles bearing the legend, "Made in Germany." The Germans are today the most aggressive commercial nation on earth, and I find that their government and their business houses are searching every nook and corner of the globe for trade openings. Unlike our American manufacturers, it may be observed just here, they are quick to change the style of their goods to meet even what they may regard as the whims of their customers, and this is an advantage of no small importance. If a manufacturer wishes to sell plows in the Philippines, for example, it would not be worth while for him to try to sell the thoroughly modern two-handled American kind to begin with. He should manufacture an improved one-handled sort at first and try gradually to make the natives see the advantages of using two handles. At present, as an American said to me in Manila, if you should seek to sell a Filipino a two-handled plow he would probably say that two handles may be all right for Americans who are not expert at plowing, but that the Filipino has pa.s.sed that stage!

I mention this only by way of ill.u.s.trating the necessity of respecting the _cus...o...b..e_, or custom, of the country. The Germans realize this, and we do not.

One day by steamer from Penang brought us to Rangoon, the capital and most important city in Burma, and (next to Bombay and Calcutta) the most important in British India. We had heard much of the place, situated thirty miles up the river "on the road to Mandalay," but found that even then the half had not been told. If there were nothing else to see but the people on the streets, a visit to Rangoon would be memorable, for nowhere else on earth perhaps is there such b.u.t.terfly-like gorgeousness and gaudiness of raiment. At a little distance you might mistake a crowd for an enormous flower-bed. All around you are men and women wearing robes that rival in brilliancy Joseph's coat of many colors.