Читать книгу: «The Arena. Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891», страница 7
In the twenty-two cities investigated by the agents of the United States Bureau, the average age at which girls begin work is found to be fifteen years and four months. Charleston, S. C., gives the highest average, it being there eighteen years and seven months, and Newark the lowest, fourteen years and seven months. The average period during which all had been engaged in their present occupations, is shown to be four years and nine months, while of the total number interviewed 9,540 were engaged in their first attempt to earn a living.
As against the opinion often expressed that foreign workers are in the majority, we find that of the whole number given, 14,120 were native born. Of the foreign born Ireland is most largely represented, having 926 and Germany next with 775. In the matter of parentage, 12,904 had foreign born fathers, and 12,406 foreign born mothers. The number of single women included in the report is 15,387; 745 were married and 1,038 widowed, from which it is evident that as a rule it is single women who are fighting their industrial fight alone. They are not only supporting themselves, but are giving their earnings largely to the support of others at home. More than half—8,754—do this, and 9,813, besides their occupation, help in the home housekeeping. Of the total number, 14,918 live at home, but only 701 of them receive board from their families. The average number in these families is 525, and each contains 248 workers.
Of those who reported their health condition at the time their work began, 16,360 were in good health, 883 in fair health, and 183 in bad health. A distinct change in health condition is shown by the fact that 14,550 are now in good health, 2,385 in fair health, and 489 in bad health.
Concerning education, church attendance, home and shop conditions, 15,831 reported. Of these, 10,456 were educated in American public schools and 5,375 in other schools; 5,854 attend Protestant churches; 7,769 Catholic, and 367 the Hebrew. A very large percentage, comprehending 2,309 do not attend church at all. In home conditions 12,020 report themselves as comfortable, while 4,693 give the home conditions as poor. “Poor” is, to the ordinary observer, to be interpreted wretched, over-crowding, all the numberless evils of tenement-house life, which is the portion of many. A side light is thrown on personal characteristics of the workers, in the tables of earnings and lost time. Out of 12,822 who reported, 373 earn less than a hundred dollars a year, and this class lost an average of 86.5 for the year covered by the investigation. With the increase of earnings the lost time decreases; the 2,147 who earn from two hundred to two hundred and fifty losing but 37.8, while 398, earning from three hundred to five hundred dollars a year, lost but 18.8 days.
The average weekly earnings by cities is no less suggestive. In Atlanta the wages are the lowest of any of the twenty-two cities, being only $4.05; in San Francisco they are the highest, being $6.91. The wages in the other cities vary between these two extremes. In New York the average wage is $5.85; in Boston, $5.64; in Chicago, $5.74; in St. Paul, $6.02; and in New Orleans, $4.31.
These sums represent the earnings of skilled labor. Many women under this head can earn eight and ten dollars a week, but the general average is only $5.24. The large proportion of unskilled workers whose wage does not exceed one hundred dollars a year, include cash girls and the least intelligent class. It is this class that suffer most from the fine system, since punctuality and thoroughness are the result of educated intelligence. The largest number earn from two to two hundred and fifty dollars, and, as has been said, lose an average of thirty days in the year. The highest average wage, $6.91, is little more than subsistence, and the lowest, $4.05, is far less than decent subsistence requires.
Absolute violation of sanitary laws, overcrowding, and a host of other evils are specified as part of the factory system. Deliberate cruelty and injustice are met only now and then, but competition forces the working in as inexpensive a manner as possible, and so makes cruelty and injustice necessary to continued existence of the employer as an industrial factor. Home conditions are seldom beyond tolerable. For the most part, they must be summed up as intolerable. Inspection, the efficiency of which has greatly increased; the demand, by the organized charities, for women inspectors, and the gradual growth of popular interest, are bringing about a few improvements, but the mass at all points are as stated. Ignorance and the vices that go with ignorance, want of thoroughness, unpunctuality, thriftlessness, and improvidence, are all in the count against the poorer order of worker, but for the most part they are living honest, self-respecting, infinitely dreary lives. This fact is emphasized in every Labor Report in which the subject of women wage-workers is treated, and impersonal as figures are usually counted to be, from each one sounds a warning which, if unheeded, must in the end mean the disaster to which these returns point as inevitable. Even in Colorado, a State not included in the government report, where opportunity is larger, it has been said, than at almost any other point in the Union, Mr. Driscoll’s report for that State shows an average wage for women of about six dollars, which, considering the cost of living, is less than the New York rate.
It is a popular belief that the working class forms a large proportion of the numbers who fill the houses of prostitution, and that “night-walkers” are made up largely from the same class. Nothing could be farther from the truth than the last statement, the falsity of which was demonstrated in the fifteenth annual report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor, its testimony being confirmed and repeated in the report we have under consideration. For the first, diligent investigation in fourteen cities showed clearly that a very small proportion among working-women entered this life. The largest number classed by occupations came from the lowest order of workers, those employed in housework and in hotels, and the next largest was found among seamstresses, employees of shirt factories, and cloak makers, both of these industries in which under-pay is proverbial. The great majority receiving not more than five dollars a week, earn it by seldom less than ten hours a day of hard labor, and not only live on this sum, but assist friends, contribute to general household expenses, dress so as to appear fairly well, and have learned every art of doing without. More than this. Since the deepening interest in their lives, and the formation of working-girls’ societies and guilds of many orders, they contribute from this scanty sum enough to rent meeting rooms, pay for instruction in many classes, and provide a relief fund for sick and disabled members. Aids, alleviations, growing interest, all are to-day given to the worker. “Homes” of every order open their doors, some so hedged about by rules that self-respect revolts and refuses to live the life demanded by them. In all of these homes, even the best, lurks always the suspicion of charity, and even when this has no active formulation in the worker’s mind, there is still the underlying sense of the essential injustice of withholding with one hand just pay, and with the other proffering a substitute in a charity, which is to reflect credit on the giver, and demand gratitude from the receiver. Here and there this is recognized, and within a short time has been emphasized by a woman whose name is associated with the work of charity organizations throughout the country,—Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell. I doubt if there is any one better fitted by long experience and almost matchless common sense to speak authoritatively. Within a short time she has written: “So far from assuming that the well-to-do portion of society have discharged all their obligations to man and God by supporting charitable institutions, I regard just this expenditure as one of the prime causes of the suffering and crime that exist in our midst. I am inclined, in general, to look upon what is called charity as the insult which is added to the injury done to the mass of the people by insufficient payment for work.”
Disguise this fact as we will; bear testimony to the inefficiency and incompetency of the workers; admit every trial and perplexity of employers, every effort to better conditions, yet there remains in the background always this shadow, in which the woman who elects to earn an honest living must walk. No more heroic battle has ever been fought than this daily one, waged silently and uncomplainingly in our midst by these workers. Their lot is all part of the general evolution from disorder, ignorance, and indifference, into the larger life, opening so slowly that impatient spirits demand dynamite to hasten the process, but as surely as the earth marches forever on its round toward that central sun that draws each smallest star of that system we call our universe.
It is certain that this is a transition period; that material conditions born of a phenomenal material progress have deadened the sense as to what constitutes real progress, and that the working-woman of to-day contends not only with visible but invisible obstacles, the nature of which we are but just beginning to discern. Twenty years ago one of the wisest of modern French thinkers, M. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, wrote of women wage-earners: “From the economic point of view, woman, who has next to no material force, and whose arms are advantageously replaced by the least machine, can have useful place and obtain fair remuneration only by the development of the best qualities of her intelligence. It is the inexorable law of our civilization—the principle and formula even of social progress, that mechanical engines are to accomplish every operation of human labor which does not proceed directly from the mind. The hand of man is each day deprived of a portion of its original task, but this general gain is a loss for the particular and for the classes whose only instrument of labor is a pair of feeble arms.”
Untrained intelligence finds earning a more and more difficult task, and for all of us it has become plain, that in the mighty problem given us by a civilization which at so many points fails to civilize, every force must be brought to bear upon its solution. These pale, anæmic, undeveloped girls swarming in factory and shop, are the mothers of a large part of the coming generation, defrauded before birth of all the elements that make strong bodies and teachable souls. It is not alone the present with which we deal. Out of the future comes a demand as instant, and justice to-day bears its fruit in larger life for other days to come. For this must be two awakenings. One for the looker-on in the struggle who has no eyes for what lies still in shadow. The other for the worker, who must join the army already aroused, realizing its limitations, reaching out for training and larger opportunity, and seeking with the eagerness born of hard conditions, some permanent way of escape. And for watcher and worker alike the word is the same:
“Light, light, and light! To break and melt in sunder
All clouds and chains that in one bondage bind
Eyes, hands, and spirits, forged by fear and wonder,
And sleek fierce fraud with hidden knife behind;
There goes no fire from heaven before their thunder,
Nor are the links not malleable that wind
Round the snared limbs and souls that ache thereunder,
The hands are mighty were the head not blind.”
THE INDEPENDENT PARTY AND MONEY AT COST
BY R. B. HASSELL
A political revolution is in progress and has attained such proportions as to command attention and repay study. The magnitude of the movement and the definiteness of its aims are not understood and appreciated by those who live far from its field of operation. The reader is asked to lay aside his preconceived notions of the subject, and consider observations made, at short range, by one whose information is gleaned not from partisan newspapers, but from the field of action.
Before passing to an analysis of the platform demands of the new party, let us adjust the perspective; consider the work already done, and the method, motive, and personnel of the party.
Scarcely twelve months have passed since the birth of the party,—one political campaign. In that short period, an organization has been perfected which carries upon its rolls 1,200,000 voters; and an esprit de corps has been created which is worthy of comparison with the enthusiasm of the old parties. It has elected two United States senators and a respectable body of congressmen. It has won its victories in the strongholds of the hitherto dominant party, overcoming in one instance an adverse State majority of 80,000. An army of lecturers has been set at work, most of them well equipped. About a thousand newspapers have been established in the interest of the movement. A national bureau of information has been created which keeps a large force of clerks constantly busy. A committee has been appointed on organization. Under its direction, State after State is being organized, and the prophecy is freely made that, before the snow flies again, an efficient branch of the central body will have been established in nearly every hamlet in the nation.
The surprising advance already made by the Independents would not need to concern us, were it not that the national conditions which made it possible, in the first instance, still exist to sustain and accelerate it. If asked to explain this advance, most partisans would say, at once, poor crops, extreme poverty and demagogism; or, as South Dakota campaign speakers were known to say, hot winds and Mr. Loucks. But these are mistaken ideas. Poverty of the people made many listeners and voters who, under other circumstances, would not have deemed it worth their while to leave the plow. An examination, however, of the vote in the counties of one State, from which a United States senator has been elected, shows that the heaviest majorities for the new party were cast in counties where farming is most diversified, and where the people have been blessed with a succession of good crops. In the counties where the people were poorest, they were more effectually under the thumb of money loaners and bankers, who held chattel mortgages over their heads. In such counties a corruption fund had a powerful influence toward keeping voters in line. Extreme poverty is always a menace to the purity of the ballot. In the well to do counties, or rather the counties where good crops had prevailed, and in which the people were reputed well-to-do, and where the heaviest vote was cast for the party, the writer has made a careful study of conditions and finds none that do not exist in most agricultural districts of the United States. The herds of cattle and bursting granaries, years ago, would have been sure indications of competence and contentment.
A little inquiry now, however, reveals discontent and a hand to hand struggle with adversity and against odds. Market values leave no margin for profit. Abundance at harvest time, disappointment on market day. Men can understand the connection between short crops and lean pocket-books, and are easily reconciled to such conditions. They may grumble but they are sensible enough to understand that they must sow again and wait for the heavens to smile. But when great heaps of corn lie in their fields awaiting sale at twelve cents a bushel, when a mighty crop of wheat brings its possessor but fifty cents a bushel, when cows are worth but fifteen dollars apiece, and good butter sells for eight cents a pound, while thousands in the land are known to be suffering because of the lack of these things, a leanness of pocket-book results which the farmer may understand, but to which he is not easily reconciled.
His eyes are open. The over-production theory explains nothing to him while the mouths of a multitude go unfed; while the beef that he sold for one and a half and two cents a pound on foot, retails in the eastern market, when dressed, for from ten to eighteen cents a pound; and while his corn and his wheat, at the other end of the line of transportation, brings twice the price he received for it here. He is able to put two and two together. He knows that primarily all wealth comes from the soil, in response to the toil of himself and his fellows. His eyes rest upon the 31,000 millionnaires of the land who roll in wealth. He says, “I helped produce that. How did they get it?” He knows that the money could not be had last fall to handle his grain and that, in consequence, a ridiculously low price was offered him in order to keep it off the market. He knows that a few men take advantage of his necessities and dictate prices just at the time when he must sell. He knows that railroads absorb nearly fifty per cent. of crop values for transportation charges, in order to pay dividends on a capitalization, fifty per cent. of which is fictitious, and that when the laws forbid it the courts of the land step in and declare it “reasonable compensation.”
In a word, it does not take a very sharp farmer to see that although hot winds, or murrain, or hog cholera increase the leanness of his pocket-book, these things do not explain that irresistible and invariable current which bears such a large portion of what he does earn into the plethoric pocket-books of the few rich. The farmer has become, perforce, a student of economics; and, although we may laugh at some of the vagaries in which he indulges, a close study of the situation and of his demands will probably show him to be about as reasonable as those are who champion the present order of things.
If the symptoms of an unnatural and unnecessary agricultural depression were confined to the Dakotas, and Kansas, and Nebraska, the farmer student might be nonplussed in his investigations. He might be led to consider his inexperience and extravagance as the source of the disease so deeply fixed upon him. But the farmer of to-day reads and travels. A Dakota farmer, a few weeks since, visited the paternal homestead in Ohio. He found, to his surprise, that his father’s farm, which fifteen years ago lay within three miles of a thriving town of two thousand inhabitants, paying an annual tax of fifteen dollars, and worth a hundred dollars an acre, now pays a tax of seventy-five dollars, and is worth but forty-five dollars an acre, although the neighboring town has increased its population to ten thousand, and is noisy with shops and factories. He found that this was not an isolated case, but a fair example of the depreciation of farm values. He was not surprised to learn that the Ohio farmers were even then gathering to organize a State alliance. A careful survey of the United States, we are sure, will measurably confirm the conclusion of the western farmer, that farming, except in those localities where it has taken on the form of market gardening, or where it yet monopolizes some specialty, is unprofitable and disappointing.
Most farmers are ready to admit that their surroundings are better and their comforts more numerous than in ancestral days, when stoves were unknown, and the women slaved over the hand-loom and spinning-wheel, when medical men bungled and schools were luxuries; but they can see with half an eye that the mighty material advances of the last half century in this country have been made to serve the rich rather than the poor, the strong instead of the weak. They do not object to railroads, and the constantly increasing facilities for travel and transportation; but they do object to laws and customs which make railroads a means of transferring the hard earnings of the farm to the coffers of money kings. The farmer has received comforts at the hands of our civilization, but he has paid a good price for them, not to the genius which created, but to the plutocrat who bought. It is not because the farmer is facing starvation that he moves politically; but because, in the midst of plenty, comparative poverty is his portion. As a legitimate result of the civilization in the presence of which he lives, his tastes have improved, and his desire for education and comfortable living has increased, and with this improvement and increase has come a widening of the distance betwixt his possessions and his desires. In other words, the shadows of contrast in social conditions in our country are hourly deepening, and it is at such times that the canker of discontent eats closest. It will serve no purpose for us to spend time in condemning this spirit, and making light of it, because it is a natural result and a political fact that can only be remedied by a removal of the immediate cause. It is not possible or desirable to rid the people entirely of the spirit of discontent, but it can be so minimized that it will be no longer a menace to national life but an incentive to progress.
It is necessary to understand thoroughly the conditions under which the work already described has been done. We have discussed the general social and financial condition of the farmer. How about his intellectual standing? We hear a great deal about the stupid, foolish farmer, easily led by demagogues. It is well to remember in this connection that those States where the Independent party has had greatest influence are the States where the smallest per cent. of illiteracy exists and, by parity of reasoning, the highest per cent. of intelligence. The fact is that the farmer of the West is not the clodhopper, at whose expense the funny man of the modern journal likes to crack jokes. He reads more widely and thinks more deeply than tradesmen or city people do, as a class. Tradesmen wear better clothes, are more urbane, and obtain a certain polish and self-possession which comes only from close contact with one’s fellows in the business and social world; all of which is very useful to them in improving the “main chance” in a competitive struggle, and might be labelled finish and sharpness. They live an intense life, within a limited circle, and have little time and less inclination to weigh questions from the larger world. To this fact may be attributed the slight interest such people take in municipal government and the dominance of slum and saloon influences. It is not so with the farmer. He reads much and widely, and the solitary plow-furrow and the quiet country road conduce to thought. A certain sturdy intelligence follows, which again and again has proven the salt of the world, the re-inforcing element of society, and is to-day the hope of our nation. While the tradesman dwells much on commercial law, trade customs, and the means of attracting trade, the farmer thinks more naturally of the general law of the land, under which he is protected or robbed, prospered or ruined. His sales are made at wholesale prices. His eyes, therefore, seek out not so much the local factors in the make up of prices as the world-wide influences which are supposed to determine them. It is a large world in which he lives, and his vision, from necessity, sweeps the whole of it.
The people of the East will never understand the merit and magnitude of the present political movement, until they give the farmer credit for intelligence of a superior order. Those who think of him as the easy prey of demagogues are mistaken. He has been such in the past. We have convincing proof that it is otherwise now. Those who are familiar with the campaign plans of the dominant parties in these days, the shameless misrepresentation of facts by party organs, the open use of large sums of money to keep so-called leaders in line, and the tremendous power of public patronage can understand how much of demagogism in every community the farmers have had to meet and overcome in order to conquer an eighty thousand majority. It has required patriotism, common sense, and a Spartan-like heroism to face their organized foes and come off victorious. To their honor be it said that few Judases have been found among them at the ballot-box, or in the halls of legislation.
The work of the Independent party, so far, has been educational in two directions. It has increased the sum of information and developed a much needed self-confidence among the farmers. The alliance meetings, to which most of us object because of their secret and exclusive nature, are schools of economics and parliamentary tactics. The secrecy of the order, however, is not as objectionable as some of us have been inclined to think. As the leaders say, the veil of secrecy in this order is quite gauzy,—intended to keep out individuals rather than to conceal deliberations and doings. It throws the farmer on his own resources. He becomes a chairman, an investigator, a committee man, and a debater. If it were otherwise, the aggressive members of the professions would frequent the meetings, and naturally assume such functions. We are confident the farmer will come to see that these same ends may be attained by methods less objectionable to the thought and spirit of our people. Justice requires us to say that the secret order of the alliance and the Independent party have no necessary connection, although they are natural allies, and the former is the source of the latter. In fact, scores of men belong to the alliance who have not yet committed themselves to the political movement, and many who are bitter in their opposition to it. Political affiliation has nothing to do with membership, and all actual farmers and their families are entitled to it. Freedom in the expression of opinion is courted and strong, ready men are being developed.
The writer has met old farmers, during the last twelve months, who are as well posted in the history of finance as the Shermans and the Allisons of the country, and who read the lessons of that history with as clear a vision. They do not get their facts from demagogical documents, as many suppose. We call to mind a laughable incident in the last campaign. A joint discussion was progressing between a bright member of the legal fraternity, who was advocating the present order and extolling the Republican past, and an uncouth but clever old farmer, who took up the cudgel in behalf of financial reform. The lawyer vociferously declared the demand notes never sold at par with gold. The farmer calmly insisted that they did, and read from an authority. The lawyer demanded the authority. The farmer asked the lawyer if he would read to the audience the name of the authority, if it was shown him. The latter could only say yes. The pamphlet was opened at its title page, and the lawyer read with best grace he could, to an audience that fairly rolled in the chairs with merriment, “Report of the Treasurer of the United States.” The farmers are going to a school where imagination is given small play, and facts are studied, uncolored by party traditions. Shall we not expect from this some good? Have we not reason to believe that the reading, intelligent majorities of the western prairies are to bring us some light and benefit?
It is useless to deny that these farmers have some intense prejudices. What class has not? And these prejudices must necessarily color opinion, and somewhat determine action. The farmer is bound to look at things from the standpoint of the poor man rather than from that of the corporation and the money loaner. The latter have had the thought and service of our statesmen for years past. As a consequence, the account between the rich and the poor is in an abnormal condition. Perhaps it is only right that the selfishness of the laboring classes should have its own way for a time, and even things up somewhat, before a new start is made.
But the class prejudice and selfishness of the farmer has been greatly over-estimated by his political enemies. His sub-treasury bill and plan for loaning money on real estate, to be sure, are intended to afford immediate relief to the farmer; but he believes, in his soul, that they would result in great advantage to the whole business world. He says, moreover, that condemnation of his plans comes with bad grace from the men who are even now supporting a financial system which delivers the money of the country over to the few and trusts them to distribute it among the many. His plan may have the same selfish ear-marks, but they are not so deep. We have been trusting a few men to distribute the currency of the nation, and have made it extremely profitable for them to do so. He asks now that this trust be transferred to the many, and gives good assurances, in the nature of things, that the many will touch the remotest needs of our people, and so diffuse currency that competition, if such a principle ever can be effective, will keep interest at a rate where labor can live and prosper.
That the independent movement is not considered a class movement, in a bad sense, but decidedly in the interest of all the middle classes, we have some proof in the citizens’ alliances and the labor unions, which have united forces everywhere with the farmers, brought about by a recognition of the simple fact that where the farmer has money, the tradesmen of his market town have money and industries of all kinds thrive. Here lies the strength of the movement. The farmers are, perhaps, the largest distinctive class of citizens, and can exercise great political influence by themselves; but they are not numerous enough to work radical changes without aid from other classes. As it is, however, in the strictly political movement among the farmers, all who sympathize with their political views are welcomed. The best evidence of this is the election of such men as Rev. J. H. Kyle and editor Peffer to the United States Senate. While the farmer has a great deal to say about the utter absence of farmers from the national halls of legislation, he is not disposed to say that farmers alone should be sent there. He is willing to send the men who are best fitted to do the work that is to be done, but they must be worshippers of the common people as distinguished from the bankers and “financiers.”
